L E V A N A; 



THE DOCTRINE OF EDUCATION. 



TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN 
OF 

WAN PAUL TEIEDEICH EICHTEE, 

AUTHOR OF "flower, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES," " TITAN," ETC., BrC 



^Blii^ 




BOSTON: 
JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY, 

Late Tickxor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co. 
1874. 






University Press : Welch, Bigelow, & Co., 
Cambridge. 



FOURTH EDITION. 

" 18 1929 

rmr and Hai^ oItA 



To Her Majesty, 
CAROLINE, QUEEN OF BAVARIA, 

WITH THE PROFOUNDEST RESPECT OF 
THE AUTHOR. 



Most Gracious Queen ! — 

THE author would consecrate Levana to mothers by your 
royal name, as the banners which a princess has worked 
receive fresh victorious power. 

Your Majesty will graciously pardon the dedication of a work 
which Germany, by the approbation expressed in the demand for 
a new, improved edition, has already dedicated to a Princess, who, 
in its best parts, will but find her own recollections. 

If, even in the lowest ranks, a mother's heart is woman's honor, 
— the sun which gently warms and dries the dew-drops of early 
tears, — this sun delights the beholder most when it stands highest 
and cherishes the distant future, and when a noble mother multi- 
plies her heart as well as her beauty, and blesses distant ages and 
countries wath her image. 

This delight becomes still greater if the mother also is the 
mother of her country, and raises her sceptre like a magic wand 
which converts tears of sorrow into tears of joy ere it dries them. 

Should the profound respect of a subject forbid him to express 
this joy in a Dedication ? 

Witli most profound respect. 

Your Majesty's 

Most obedient, humble servant, 

JEAN PAUL FR. RICHTER. 







W'^^ 







TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE, 




T a time when the public mind is so fully 
awakened to the importance of educa- 
tion, it appeared to the Translator that 
the thoughts of one of the greatest Germans on the 
subject were worthy of deep consideration ; and 
he offers them with the more satisfaction, because 
he believes it impossible either for the advocates 
or for the opponents for the government scheme 
of education to draw offensive weapons from this 
arsenal. For Levana treats neither of national 
nor congregational education : it elevates neither 
state nor priest into educator ; but it devolves that 
duty, where the interest ever ought to be, on the 
parents, and particularly on the mother. 

It is far from the Translator's object to dispar- 
age the great efforts now making to improve the 
state of popular education ; but he believes that, 
in propounding general systems, it is too much for- 



vi TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. 

gotten that real education is the work of individu- 
als on individuals. It may be necessary — it is 
necessary — to provide instruction, and, as far as 
possible, education, for the classes who tvre too 
ignorant to seek it for themselves. But let us not, 
in tli^ mania for systems, forget how little these 
alone can effect. And, further, we would ask, is 
the education of the upper classes so perfect that 
they may leave all care for it, to watch only over 
that of the lower ? If there be much of crime — 
the acknowledged consequence of ignorance — 
among the masses, is there less of vice — the 
equally sure accompaniment of bad education- — 
among the higher grades of society ? 

In the belief that Levana may tend much lo 
ameliorate that department of education which is 
most neglected, and needs most care, — home 
training, — the Translator makes no apology for 
clothing it in an English dress. He is, indeed, 
surprised that it lias not previously been presented 
to tlie English reader. But, like all Richter's writ- 
ings, Levana is peculiarly characterized by that 
union of qualities called in England " German." 
This feature, especially when displayed in a work 
on so serious a subject as education, and being 
most strongly marked, in the introductory chapters, 



TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. vii 

on which the reception of a book so much depends, 
may have led to its being considered unsuitable to 
English taste. The early part, indeed, may cause 
many to close the book, who would find much both 
to interest and instruct in a patient perusal of the 
whole work, combining as it does, in a remarkable 
degree, sound practical sense with fanciful and 
varied illustration. The acknowledged difficulty 
of Richter's style has also, doubtless, had a deter- 
ring effect. Those who are acquainted with his 
writings will be able to appreciate the difficulties 
which have beset the Translator, and will be the 
least inclined to judge harshly the shortcomings of 
the translation, as compared with its great origi- 
nal. For who — save Carlyle — can hope to do 
justice to the humorous, pathetic, poetic E-ichter ; 
to him whom his countrymen call '' Jean Paul, der 
Einzige " ? 

The Translator thinks it right to add, that he 
has occasionally omitted, or compressed, a few sen- 
tences, where the general usefulness of the work 
was obviously increased by so doing. This discre- 
tion has, however, been very sparingly used, and in 
no case so as to interfere with the scope of the 
rrigiiial. 




AUTHOR'S PREFACE. 




OYERRE only required from a good di- 
rector of the ballet — besides the art. 
of dancing — geometry, music, poetry, 
painting, and anatomy. But to write 
upon education, means to write upon almost every- 
thing at once ; for it has to care for, and watch 
over, the development of an entire, tliough minia- 
ture, world in little, — a microcosm of the micro- 
cosm. All the energies with which nations liave 
labored and signalized themselves once existed as 
germs in the hand of the educator. If we carried 
the subject still further, every century, every na- 
tion, and even every boy and every girl, would 
require a distinct system of education, a differeut 
primer, and domestic French governess, etc. 

If, consequently, on a subject like this, only acta 
sanctorum^ or, more correctly, sanctifi candor um 
(acts less of saints than of those to be made 
saints), can be written, and if a folio be nothing 
more than a fragment, there cannot be, on sucli an 
inexhaustible subject, one book too much, even 
after the best, except the worst ; and where frag- 



X AUTHOR'S PREFACE. 

ments alone are possible, all that arc possible com* 
pletc tlie whole. 

The Author trusts thus to excuse his boldness as 
well as his poverty ; for both, as in the state, are 
nearly connected. He has not read every tiling 
wliich has been written upon education, but here 
and there something. First and last he names 
Rousseau's Emile. No preceding work can be 
compared to his ; the succeeding imitators and 
transcribers seem to resemble him more. Not 
Rousseau's individual rules, many of which may 
be erroneous without injury to the whole, but the 
spirit of education which fills and animates the 
work, has shaken to their foundations and purified 
all the school-rooms and even the nurseries in 
Europe. In no previous work on education was 
the ideal so richly and beautifully combined with 
actual observation as in his. He was a man, could 
therefore easily become a child, and so he mani- 
fested and saved the nature of children. Basedow 
was his intelligent translator and publisher in 
Germany, — this land of pedagogopsedists (of edu- 
cation of children's educators) and of love of 
children, — and Pestalozzi is now confirming 
Rousseau among the people. 

Individual rules, without the spirit of education, 
rcsoinhle a dictionary without a grammar of the 
language.. A book of rules is not merely incapable 
of exhausting and distinguishing tlie infinite vari- 
ety of individual dispositions and circumstances ; 
but, even granting it were perfect itself, and able 



AUTHOR'S PREFACE. XI 

to make others perfect, it yet would but be like a 
system of remedies laboring to counteract some 
one symptom of a disease ; recommending, for in- 
stance, something of a reducing nature, to be taken 
before fainting, and to prevent tingling in tlic ears, 
and unnatural brilliancy of eye ; a tonic to cure 
paleness and coldness of the face ; an aperient for 
nausea. But this is worthless ! Do not, like com- 
mon educators, water tlie individual branches, but 
the roots, and they will moisten and unfold the 
rest. Wisdom and morality are no ants' colonies 
of separate, co-operating workmen, but organic 
parents of the mental future, which only require 
animating nourishment. We merely reverse the 
ignorance of the savages, who sowed gunpowder 
instead of making it, when we attempt to com- 
pound what can only be developed. 

But although the spirit of education, always 
watching over the ^hole, is nothing more thain an 
endeavor to liberate, by means of a freeman, the 
ideal human being which lies concealed in every 
child ; and though, in the application of the divine 
to the cliild's nature, it must scorn some iiseful 
things, some seasonable, individual, or immediate 
ends ; yet it must incorporate itself in the most 
definite applications, in order to be clearly mani- 
fested. 

Here the Author diffei^ — but to his phi/osoph- 
ical disadvantage — from those transcende^^tal su- 
perintendents of the school-room slopes. -v^l>o write 
thereon with so round a piece '^f ^^ 'k^h^ that one 



xii AUTHOR'S TEEFACE. 

may find in their broad strokes wliatev er he de- 
sires, and who lay down a complete Brownian 
system of education in the two words, — strong, 
weak ; though, indeed, Brown's disciple, Schmidt, 
only uttered one word, — strong. Dr. Tamponet 
declared that he would trace heresies in the Lord's 
Prayer, if any one desired it ; our age, on the con- 
trary, knows how to find, a Lord's Prayer in every 
heresy. A mother who has a particular child to 
educate can certainly extract no advantage from 
such philosophical indifierentism ; although that 
class of fine, high-sounding compilations always 
hears witness to a certain amount of artistic talent 
in their sonorousness and. their theft ; hence. Gall 
justly found for this sense a place between the 
organs of music and purloining. 

But this language docs not belong to the Pref- 
ace, and the object of this work has forbidden it to 
find a place in the book itself; wherefore, this may 
be regarded in form as my most serious produc- 
tion, to which only a short, occasional, comic 
Appendix shall be added. 

The reader will please to take it patiently if he 
find what has been already printed again printed 
here. What has been printed is necessary as the 
bond and bast-matting of what has not been 
printed ; but the bast-matting must not cover the 
whole garden, instead of merely tying up the trees. 
But there are two still better excuses. Known 
rules in education gain new force if new expe- 
rience verifies them. The Author has three times 



AUTHOR'S PREFACE. xiii 

been in the position of trying them upon different 
children of all ages and talents ; and he now en- 
joys with his own the pedagogic jus trium libero- 
rum (law of three children) ; and every other 
person's experience related in this book has been 
made his own. Secondly, printing-ink now is like 
sympathetic ink, it becomes as quickly invisible as 
visible ; wherefore it is good to repeat old thoughts 
in the newest books, because the old works in 
which they stand are not read. New translations 
of many truths, as of foreign standard works, must 
be given forth every half-century. And, indeed, 
I wish that even old German standard books were 
turned into new German from time to time, and 
so could find their way into the circulating libra- 
ries. 

Why are there flower and weed gleanings of 
everything, but no wine or corn gleanings of the 
innumerable works on education ? Why should 
one single good observation or rule be lost because 
it is imprisoned in some monstrous folio, or blown 
away in some single sheet ? For dwarfs and 
giants, even in books, do not live long. Our age, 
this balloon, or air-ship, which, by simultaneous 
lighting of new lamps, and throwing out of old 
iiallast, has constantly mounted higher and higher, 
might now, I should think, cease to throw out, and 
rather lovingly endeavor to collect than to disperse 
the old. 

However little so disjointed a collection of 
thoughts could teach rules, it would yet arouse 



xiv AUTHOR'S TREFACE. 

and sliarpen the educational sense, from which 
they originally sprung. Therefore every mother 
— still better every bride — ought to read the 
many-volumed and, in another sense, many-sided 
revision of education, to which no nation can op- 
pose anything similar ; slie should read it, and cut 
and polish herself, like a precious stone, by it on 
every side, so that her individuality of character 
may all the more readily discover, protect, revere, 
and cherish the dim manifestations of it in her 
child. 

Something very different from such a progres- 
sive cabinet of noble thoughts, or even from my 
weak Levana, with her fragments in her arms, is 
the usual kind of complete system of education 
which one person after another has written, and 
will write. It is difficult, — I mean the end, not 
the means. For it is very easy to proceed with 
bookbinder's and bookmaker's paste, and fasten 
together a thousand selected thoughts with five of 
your own, especially if you conscientiously remark 
in the Preface that you have availed yourself of 
the labors of your predecessors, yet make no men- 
tion of one in the work itself, but sell such a min 
iatiiro library in one volume to the reader as a 
nientnl facsimile of yourself. How much better 
in this case were a hole-maker than a liolc-hider ! 
How much better were it if associated authors (I 
mean those friendly hundreds who move along one 
])ath, uttering precisely the same sound) entirely 
died out, — as Humboldt tells us that in the tropi- 



AUTHOR'S PREFACE. XV 

cal regions there are none of those sociable plants 
which make our forests monotonous, but next 
each tree a perfectly different one grows. A diary 
about an ordinary child would be much better 
than a book upon children by an ordinary writer. 
Yes, every man's opinions about education would 
be valuable if he only wrote what he did not copy. 
The author, unlike a partner, should always only 
say " I," and no other word. 

The first part of this work treats at large of the 
budding — the second and third of the blossoming 
— season of childhood. In the first, tlie three 
early years, like the academic triennium, after 
which the gate of the soul, language, is opened, 
are the object of care and observation. Here, edu- 
cators are the Hours who open or close the gates 
of heaven. Here, true education, the developing-, 
is yet possible ; by whose means the long second, 
the curative, may be spared. For the child, — yet 
in native innocence, before his parents have become 
his serpents on the tree, — speechless, still unsus- 
ceptible of verbal empoisonment, — led by customs, 
not by words and reasons, therefore all the more 
easily moved on the narrow and small pinnacle of 
sensuous experience ; — for the child, I say, on 
this boundary-line between the monkey and the 
man, the most important era of life is contained in 
the years which immediately follow his non-exist- 
ence, in which, for the first time, he colors and 
moulds himself by companionship with others. 
The parent's hand may cover and shelter the ger- 



xvi AUTHOR'S PREFACE. 

minating seed, but not the luxuriant tree : conse- 
quently, first faults are the greatest ; and mental 
maladies, unlike the small-pox, are the more dan- 
gerous the earlier they are taken. Every new 
educator effects less than his predecessor ; until at 
last, if we regard all life as an educational institu- 
tion, a circumnavigator of the world is less in- 
fluenced by all the nations he has seen than by his 
nurse. 

At least this book has been composed with warm- 
est love for the little beings, the delicate flower- 
gods of a soon fading Eden. May Levana, the 
motherly goddess, who was formerly entreated to 
give a father's heart to fathers, hear tlie prayer 
which the title of this book addresses to her, and, 
in doing so, justify both it and this. The demands 
of the state or of learning, unfortunately, rob the 
child of half its father. The education of most 
fathers is but a system of rules to keep the child at 
a respectful distance from them, and to form him 
more with regard to their quiet than his powers ; 
or, at most, under a tornado of wrath, to impart as 
much meal of instruction as he can scatter. But I 
would ask men of business what education of souls 
rewards more delightfully and more immediately 
than that of the innocent, who resemble rosewood, 
which imparts its odor even while being carved and 
shaped ? Or what now remains to the decaying 
world — among so many ruins of what is noblest 
and ancicntcst — except children, the pure beings 
yet unfalsificd by the age and the world ? Only 



AUTHOR'S PREFACE. xvii 

they, with a higher object than that for which they 
were formerly used, can behold futurity and truth 
in the magic mirror, and with bandaged eyes 
draw the precious lot from the wheel of chance. 
The words that the father speaks to his children in 
the privacy of home are not heard by the world ; 
but, as in whispering-galleries, they are clearly 
heard at the end, and by posterity. 

It would be my greatest reward if, at the end of 
twenty years, some reader as many years old should 
return thanks to me, that the book which he is 
then reading was read by his parents. 

JEAN PAUL FR. KICHTER. 
Baikeuth, May 2, 1806. 



Contents. 



FIRST FRAGMENT. 
Chap. Pagb 

I. Importakce of Education 1 

11. Inaugural Discourse at the Johanneum-Paullinum ; 

OR, Proof that Education effects little * . . 5 
III. Importance of Education 20 



SECOND FRAGMENT. 

I. Spirit and Principle of Education .... 29 
II. To Discover and to Appreciate the Individuality 

of the Ideal Man 36 

III. On the Spirit of the Age 42 

IV. Religious Education 53 

THIRD FRAGMENT. 

L The Beginning of Education 67 

II. The Joyousness of Children 7G 

III. Games of Children 82 

IV. Children's Dances 95 

V. Music 98 

VI. Commands, Prohibitions, Punishments, and Crying 100 

VII. Punishments 109 



XX CONTENTS. 

VIII. Screaming and Ckying of Children . . . 117 
IX. On the Trustfulness of Children .... 122 

APPENDIX TO THE THIRD FRAGMENT. 
On Physical Education 127 

COMIC APPENDIX AND EPILOGUE TO THE FIRST YOLUilE. 

A DREAMED Letter to the late Professor Gellert, in 
which the Author begs for a Tutor .... 148 



FOURTH FRAGMENT. 

ON FEMALE EDUCATION. 

I .161 

TI. On the Destination of the Female Sex . . 168 

III. Nature of Women 175 

IV. Education of Girls 188 I 

V. Private Instructions of a Prince to the Gov- i 

euness of his Daughter 226 J 



FIFTH FRAGMENT. 
I. On the Education of a Prince 241 

SIXTH FRAGMENT. 

ox THE MORAL EDUCATION OF BOYS. 

1 277 

II. Truthfulness 299 

III. Education «»k the Affections 310 

IV Suri'LEMKNTARV APPENDIX TO MoRAL EDUCATION . 325 



CONTEXTS. xxi 



SEVENTH FRAGMENT. 

I. On the Development of the Desire for Intellec- 
tual Proghess 342 

II. Speech and Writing 345 

III. Attention, and the Power of Adaptive Combina- 

tion 353 

IV. Development of Wit 362 

V. Development of Reflection, Abstraction, and 

Self-Knowledge; together with an extra Para- 
graph ON the Powers of Action and Business . 368 
VI. On the IZducation of the Recollection, — not of 

the Memory 370 



EIGHTH FRAGMENT. 

I. Development of the Sense of Beauty . . . 378 
U. Classical Education 384 



NINTH FRAGMENT, ok Conclusion .... 390 



LEVANA 



THE DOCTRINE OF EDUCATION. 



FIRST FRAGMENT, 

Chap. I. Importance of Education, §§ 1-3. — Chap. IT. Discourse 
against its Influence, §§ 4-15. — Chap. III. Discourse for the same, 
H 16-20. 

CHAPTER I. 

IMPORTANCE OF EDUCATION. 




§ 1. 

HEN Antipater demanded fifty children as 
hostages from the Spartans, they offered him, 
in their stead, a hundred men of distmction ; 
unhke ordinary educators, who precisely re- 
verse the offering. The Spartans thought rightly and 
nobly. In the world of childhood all posterity stands be- 
fore us, upon which we, like Moses upon the promised 
land, may only gaze, but not enter ; and at the same time 
it renews for us the ages of the young world, behind 
which we must appear ; for the child of the most civil- 
ized capital is a born Otaheitan, and the one-year-old 
Sans-culotte a first Christian, and the last children of the 
earth came upon the world with the paradise of our first 
parents. So, according to Bruyn, the children of the 

1 A 



2 LEVANA. 

Samojeds are beautiful, and only the parents ugly. If 
there were a perfect and all-powerful system of education, 
and a unity of educators with themselves and with one 
another ; then, since each generation of children begins 
the history of the world anew, the immediate, and through 
it the distant future, into which we can now gaze and 
grasp so little, would stand much more fairly in our 
power. For deeds and books — the means by which we 
have hitherto been able to work upon the world — al- 
ways find it already defined, and hardened and full of 
people like ourselves ; only by education can we sow 
upon a pure, soft soil the seeds of poison or of honey- 
bearing flowers ; and as the gods to the first men, so do 
we, physical and spiritual giants to children, descend to 
these little ones, and form them to be great or small. It 
is a touching and a mighty thought that now, before their 
educator, the great spirits and teachers of our immediate 
posterity creep, as the sucklings of his milk-store, — that 
he guides future suns, hke little wandering stars, in his 
leading-strings. And it is all the more important because 
he can neither know whether he has before him, to un- 
fold to good or evil, a hell-god for humanity, or a pro- 
tecting and light-giving angel ; nor can foresee at what 
dangerous moment of futurity the magician, who, trans- 
formed into a little child, now plays before him, will rise 
up a giant. 

§2. 

Our immediate future demands thought : our earth is 
filled with gunpowder, — like the age of the migration of 
nations, ours prepares itself for spiritual and political 
wanderings, and under all state buildings, professorial 
chairs, and temples the earth quakes. Do you know 



IMPORTANCE OF EDUCATION. 3 

whether the little boy who plucks flowers at your side 
may not one day, from his island Corsica, descend as a 
war-god, into a stormy universe, to play with storms and 
to destroy, or to purify and to sow ? Would it then be 
indifferent whethei', in educating him, you had been his 
Fenelon, his Cornelia, or his Dubois ? For, although you 
might not be able to break or bend the power of genius, — 
tlie deeper the sea, the more precipitous the coast, — yet 
in the most important initiatory decade of life, in the first, 
at the opening dawn of all feelings, you might surround 
and overlay the slumbering lion energies with all the 
tender habits of a gentle heart and all the bands of love. 
Whether an angel or a devil educate that great genius is 
of far more importance than whether a learned doctor or 
a Charles the Simple teach him. 

Although a system of education must, in the first in- 
stance, provide for the beings endowed wnth genius ; since 
these, though they seldom arise, yet alone rule the world's 
history, either as leaders of souls, or of bodies, or of both ; 
yet would such a system too much resemble a practical 
exposition of how to conduct one's self in case of winning 
the great prize, if it did not observe that the multitude of 
mediocre talents on which a great one can act are quite 
as important in the mass as the man of genius is in the 
individuah And therefore, since, on the one hand, you 
give to posterity, as alms to a beggar, through children ; 
and, on the other, must send these last, like unarmed 
men, into a hidden period whose poisonous gales you 
know not ; so there is nothing more important to pos- 
terity, than whether you send forth your pupil as the 
seed-corn of a harvest, or the powder-train of a mine, 
which destroys itself and everything with it : and nothing 
is more important to the child, than whether you have or 



4 LEVANA. 

have not given him a magic jewel which may preserve 
and conduct him uninjured. 

Let a chikl be more holy to you than the present, 
which consists of things and matured men. By means 
of the child, — although with difficulty, — by means of the 
short lever-arm of humanity, you set in motion the long 
one, whose mighty arc you can scarcely define in the 
height and depth of time. But there is something else 
you certainly know, — namely, that the moral develop- 
ment — which is education, as the intellectual is instruc- 
tion — knows and fears no time nor futurity. In this you 
give to the child a heaven wuth a pole star, wdiich may 
ever guide him in whatever new countries he may after- 
wards reach. 

§3. 

A perfect child w^ould be a heavenly aurora of the 
soul ; at least its appearance would not be so variously 
restrained and so difficult as that of a perfect man. On 
him everything, from the state down to himself, exercises 
a forming influence ; but on the fresh child, parents repeat 
with full power the lawgiving, moulding, character of 
Lycurgus and of Moses ; they can separate their pupil 
from others, and form liim without interference, better 
than a Spartan or Jew^ish state could do. Consequently 
one ought to expect more from the unlimited monarchy 
of parents. Children living in this kingdom, without 
Salic law^, and in such an overflow of laws and lawgivers 
that the rulers are often more numerous than the ruled, 
and the governing house larger than the governed, — hav- 
ing everywhere before them cabinet orders, and offended 
majesties, and most rapid mandata sine clausula, and be- 
hind the glass the exalted sceptre of the re 1, — possessing 



PRESENT INEFFICIENCY OF EDUCATION. 5 

in their sovereign their bread-master, as well as their 
pain and pleasure master, and protected against him by 
no foreign power ; for maltreatment of slaves is pun- 
ished in many countries, even of cattle in England, but 
nowhere of children, — children, then, thus absolutely 
governed without opposition party, or anti-ministerial 
gazette, and without representatives, should issue, one 
would think, out of this smallest state within the state, 
lar better educated than grown-up persons educated in 
the greatest of all educational establishments, the state 
itself 

Nevertheless, both educational establishments and states 
seem to work so uniformly, that it is worth while, next 
to the necessity of education, to consider, in the two fol- 
lowing discourses, its possibility. 



CHAPTER II 



INAUGURAL DISCOURSE AT THE JOHANNEUM-PAULLINUM ; 
OR, PROOF THAT EDUCATION EFFECTS LITTLE. 

§4. 

MOST honored Inspector of Schools, Rector, Con- 
and Sub-rector, master of the third class ! most 
worthy teacher of the lower classes and fellow-laborers ! 
I hope I shall, to the best of my abilities, express my 
pleasure at being inducted as lowest teacher into your 
educational establishment, by entering on my post of 
honor with the proof that school education, as well as 
home education, has neither evil conse ;[uences, nor any 



6 LEVANA. 

other. If I am so fortunate as to lead us all to a quiet 
conviction of this absence of consequences, I may also 
possibly obtain that we shall all fill our laborious offices 
easily and cheerfully, without boasting, and with a cer- 
tain confidence that needs fear nothing ; every day we 
shall walk in and out among the pupils, sit on our teach- 
ing-chair as on an easy-chair, and let everything take its 
own course. 

Fu-st, I believe, I must set forth who are the educators 
and complete fashioners of children, — for fashioned, in 
one way or another, they are ; and in which way, rests 
with and in us ; — and afterwards I will naturally touch 
upon ourselves, and point out the easy change which may 
be effected. 

§5. 

Whence comes it that hitherto no age has spoken, coun- 
selled, and done so much about education as our own; 
and again, among nations, none so much as Germany, 
into which Rousseau's winged seeds have been blown 
out of France and ploughed in ? The ancients wrote and 
did little for it ; their schools were rather for young men 
than children, and in the philosophical schools of Athens, 
the learner frequently was, or might be, older than the 
teacher. Sparta was a Stoa, or garrison-school, at once 
for parents and children. The Romans had Grecian 
slaves for their schoolmasters, and yet their children be- 
came neither Greeks nor slaves. In the ages when the 
great and glorious deeds of Christendom, and knighthood, 
and freedom rose like stars on the dark horizon of Europe, 
school buildings lay scattered around as mere dull, little, 
dark, savage huts, or monks' cells. And what have the 
political vowels of Europe, the English, whose island 



I RESENT INEFFICIENCY OF EDUCATION. 7 

is a school of citizens, and whose election every seven 
years is a wandering seven-day Sunday school ? — what 
have they hitherto better than mere estabhshments for 
mal-education ? Where do the children more resemble 
the parents — and to anything else than a mirror of him- 
self, be it a flat, a concave, or a convex one, the teacher 
cannot wish to mould and polish his pupil — than even m 
those places where the educators are silent, among sav- 
ages, Greenlanders, and Quakers ? 

And the further one looks back through past ages, to 
the hoary nations of antiquity, the fewer school-books and 
Cyropedias — in fact, from want of all books — were 
there : all the more was the man lost in the state ; all the 
less was the woman, who might have educated, formed 
for it : nevertheless, every child was the image of its par- 
ents, which is more than the best ought to desire, since 
God can only behold his own image in men as a carica- 
ture. And are not our present improved educational in- 
stitutions a proof that men can raise themselves freely 
and without aid from bad to better, and, consequently, to 
all other establishments of a similar kind ? 

§6. 
But who then educates in nations and ages ? — Both ! 
— The living time, which, for twenty or thirty years 
struggles unceasingly with men through actions and opin- 
ions, tossing them to and fro as with a sea of waves, must 
soon wash away or cover the precipitate of the short 
school years, in which only one man, and only words 
taught. The century is the spiritual climate of man, mere 
education the hot-house and forcing-pit, out of which he 
is taken and planted forever in the other. By centurv is 
here meant the real century, wliich may as often truly 



8 LEVANA. 

consist of ten years, as of ten tliousand, and which is 
dated, hke religious eras, only from great men. 

What can insulated words do against hving present 
action ? The present has for new deeds also new words ; 
the teacher has only dead languages for the, to all appear- 
ance, dead bodies of his examples. 

The educator has himself been educated, and is already 
possessed, even without his knowledge, by the spirit of 
the age, which he assiduously labors to banish out of the 
youth (as a whole city criticises the spirit of the whole 
city). Only, alas ! every one believes himself to stand so 
precisely and accurately in the zenith of the universe, 
that, according to his calculation, all suns and nations 
must culminate over his head ; and he himself, like the 
countries at the equator, cast no shadow save into himself 
alone. For were this not so, how could so many — as I 
also hereafter propose to do — speak of the spirit of the 
age, when every word implies a rescue from, and eleva- 
tion above it ; just as we cannot perceive the ebb and 
flow of the tide in the ocean, but only at its boundaries, 
the coasts. In like manner, a savage cannot depict a sav- 
age so clearly as a civilized man can do. But in truth, 
the painters of the spirit of the age have for the most part 
represented the last one, nothing more. The great man, 
the poet and thinker, has never been so clearly known to 
himself, that the crystal light-holder and the light have 
become one ; much less then have other men. However 
easily blooming every man may open towards the sky, he 
is yet drawn down by a root into the dark, fast earth. 

§7. 
The spirit of the nation and of the age decides, and is 
at once the schoolmaster and the school ; for it seizes on 



PRESEXT INEFFICIENCY OF EDUCATION. 9 

the pupil to form him with two vigorous hands and pow- 
ers ; with the living lesson of action, and with its unalter- 
able unity. If — to begin with unity — education must 
be, like the Testament, a continuous endeavor to withdraw 
the force of interrupting mixtures, then nothing builds up 
so strong as the present, which ceases not for a moment, 
and eternally repeats itself; and which, with joy and sor- 
row, with towns and books, with friends and enemies, 
in short, with thousand-handed life, presses and seizes on 
us. No teacher of the people continues so uniformly one 
with himself as the teaching people. Minds molten into 
masses lose something of their free movements : which 
bodies, for instance, that of the world, perhaps that of the 
universe, seem to gain by their very massiveness, and, 
like a heavy colossus, to move all the more easily along 
the old, iron-covered track. For however much mar- 
riage?, old age, deaths and enmities, are in the individual 
case subject to the law of freedom, yet in a whole nation, 
lists of births and deaths can be made, by which it may 
be shown that in the Canton of Berne (according to Mad. 
de Stael) the number of divorces, as in Italy that of mur- 
ders, is the same from year to year. Must not, now, the 
little human being placed on such an eternally and ever 
similarly acting world, be borne as upon a flying earth, 
where the only directions that a teacher can give avail 
nothing, because he has first unconsciously received his 
line of movement upon it ? Thence, in spite of all re- 
formers and informers, nations, like meadows, reach ever 
a similar verdure ; thence, even in capital cities, where all 
school-books and schoolmasters, and even parents of every 
kind, educate, the spirit maintains itself unalterably the 
same. 

Repetition is the mother not only ot study, but also of 
I* 



lo LEVANA. 

education. Like the fresco-painter, the teacher lays col- 
ors on tlie wet plaster which ever fade away, and which 
he must ever renew until they remain and brightly shine. 
"VVho then, at Naples for instance, Liys the colors most 
frequently on the spiritual tablet of one individual, the 
one tutor, or the multitude of 30,000 advocates, 30,000 
lazzaroni, and 30,000 monks; a threefold company of 
fates, or ninefold one of nine murderers, compared with 
which Vesuvius is a quiet man who suffers himself to be 
entreated by Saint Januarius * (although not in January) ? 
Certainly one might say that also in fixmilies there 
educates, besides the ])opular ma>ses, a pedagogic crowd 
of people ; at least, ibr instance, aunts, grandfathers, 
grandmothers, father, mother, godparents, friends of the 
family, the yearly domestics, and at the end of all the in- 
structor beckons with his forefinger, so that — could this 
force continue as long as it would gladly be maintained — 
a child, under these many masters, would resemble, much 
more than one thinks, an Indian slave, wdio wanders 
about with the inburnt stamps of his various masters. 
But how does the multitude disappear compared with the 
higher one, by which it was colored ; just as all the burnt 
marks of the slave yet cannot overcome the hot black 
coloring of the sun, but receive it as a coat of arms in a 
sable field? 

§8. 

The second mighty power by which the spirit of the 
age and people teaches and conquers is the living action. 
Not the cry, says a Chinese author, but the rising, of a 
wild duck impels the flock to follow him in upward flight. 
One war fought against a Xerxes inflames the heart quite 
differently, more purely and more strongly, than the pe- 
* The protecting saint of the Neapolitan.'' against Vesuvius. 



PKESENT INEFFICIENCY OF EDUCATION. II 

rusal of it three times in Cornelius, Plutarch, and Herodo- 
tus : for this last, along with the whole teaching of school 
phrases, is merely an intellectual imitation in cork (a 
phelloplastic, according to Bottiger's re translation into the 
Greek) in order easily to represent ancient temples and 
magnificent buildings in light cork forms. Yea, the mere 
ancestral images of deeds in Plutarch's Westminster Ab- 
bey cast the seeds of the divine word more deeply into 
the heart than one or a few thousand volumes of sermons 
full of true pulpit eloquence. Heaven ! if words could 
be compressed to deeds, only a thousand to one, could 
they yet arouse upon an earth in which pulpits, profes- 
sors' chairs, and libraries of all ages snow down unceas- 
ingly their most pure cold exhortations, one single passion 
to hurl forth volcanic fire ? Would not history then be 
surrounded with mere snow craters and icebergs ? Ah ! 
most respected teachers, if even we, with our great col- 
lege libraries, that preach to us for tens of years, have 
never once been brought so far as to become holy men 
for a month, nay for a week, what dare we expect from 
the few volumes of words which we let fall in school- 
hours? Or what more should the parents at home ex- 
pect ? 

The pedagogic powerlessness of words is unfortunately 
confessed in a peculiar manner, which is daily renewed 
in each of us. Namely, every individual being is divided 
into a teacher and his scholars ; or is split up into the 
teacher's chair and the scholars' form. Should you row 
beheve that this perpetual house-tutor in the four cham- 
bers of the brain, — who daily gives private lessons to 
the sharer of his apartment, philanthropist, and boarder, 
— who is a morning, evening, and night preacher, — who 
never cease? with his conversatorium and repetitoriura, — 



12 LEVANA. 

who accompanies the pupil, whom he loves as himself 
and conversely, everywhere with notes of instruction as 
tutor on his travels, in idle hours and wine-drinkings, by- 
seats on the throne, by the chair of instruction and else- 
where, — who, as the most unlimited head-master to be 
found under the skull, ever sleeps with his scholar, as a 
sergeant with a recruit, in the same bed, and from time 
to time reminds him of much when a man has forgotten 
himself, — in short, could you believe that this so ex- 
tremely rare Mentor, who from the pineal-gland, as the 
lodging-place of the high light, eternally teaches down- 
ward ; nevertheless, after fifty and more judgments and 
years, has experienced nothing better in his Telema- 
chus, than what the pure Minerva (the well-known and 
anonymous Mentor in the Telemachus), with all her 
modesty, in the greatest head of the world, in that of 
Jupiter, also had to experience, namely, that she could 
not spare her pupil a single one of his animal transfor- 
mations ? This, indeed, were scarcely to be believed, if 
we did not daily see the most lamentable instances of it 
in ourselves. There is, for example, in the history of the 
learned something very usual and very pitiful : — that 
excellent men have resolved for many years to rise earlier 
in a morning, without much coming of it, — unless they 
may perhaps break through the habit at the last day. 

§9. 
Permit us to return : and since we have easily asked 
whether a man may be more effectually moved by a 
thousand outward foreign words, than by a billion of his 
own inward ones, let us not be very much astonished if 
the stream of words which is given to the youth, in order 
that he may thereby guide and bear himself up in tho 



PKESEXT INEFFICIENCY OF EDUCATION. 13 

ocean, should be dissipated by the winds and waves on 
every side. But give us leave to remark, that we lay 
many things to the account of school-rooms, that is, of 
words, which have in fact had their sole origin on the 
common teaching-ground of action ; just as, in former 
times, general pestilences were ascribed to the poisoning 
of particular wells by the Jews. The school-house of the 
young soul does not merely consist of lecture and lesson 
rooms, but also of the school-ground, the sleeping-room, 
the eating-room, the play-ground, the staircase, and of 
eveiy place. Heaven ! what intermixture of other influ- 
ences, always either to the advantage or prejudice of 
education ! The physical growth of the pupil nourishes 
and draws forth a mental one ! Nevertheless, this is 
ascribed to the pedagogic tan-bed ; just as if one must 
net necessarily grow cleverer and taller at the same time I 
One might quite as properly attribute the service of the 
muscles to the leading-strings. Parents very often in 
their own children regard that as the effect of educational 
care and attention which in strangers they would merely 
consider the consequence of human grov^^h. There are 
so many illusions ! If a great man have gone through 
any one educational establishment, he is ever after ex- 
plained by that : either he did not resemble it, and then 
it is held to have been a moulding counter-irritation ; or 
he did, and then it acted as an incitement to life. In the 
same way one might regard the blue library, whose bind- 
ing taught the librarian Duval his first lessons in arith- 
metic, as an arithmetical book, and school for arithmetic. 
If parents, or men in general, in all their education seek 
nothing else than to make their physical image into their 
more perfect mental one, and consequently to varnish 
over this copy with the departed brightness of the origi- 



14 LEVANA. 

nal, then must they readily fall into the mistake of 
esteeming an inborn resemblance an acquired one, and 
physical fathers spiritual ones, and nature freedom. But 
in this and the former consideration, that holds true of 
children which does of nations : there were found in the 
new world ten customs of the old, — six Chinese in Peru, 
four Hottentotish in Western America,* — without any 
other nearer descent to account for these resemblances 
than the general one from Adam, or humanity. 

§ 10. 
We may, excellent fellow-workers, especially flatter 
ourselves with services to humanity, when the position is 
)M-oved true, that we effect little, or nothing, by education. 
As in the mechanical world every motion, if the oppo- 
sition of friction were removed, Avould be unceasingly 
continued, and every change become eternal ; so, in the 
spiritual world, if the pupil less bravely opposed and 
vanquished the teacher, a more beggarly life would be 
eternally repeated than we can at all picture to ourselves. 
I mean this : if all the streets and times of this poor 
earth were to be filled with dull, stiff images from the 
pedagogic princely mirrors, that is, with counterfeits of 
school-men, so that every age might be impressed by the 
other, manikin on manikin ; what else is wanted for this 
tedious misery, but that education should succeed beyond 
our expectations, and a tutor and schoolmaster allow his 
head, like a crowned one, to pass stam|ied in all hands 
and corners ? And a whole bench of knights might 
become an assembly of candidates fit for the tournament, 
because they had been previously clean and well copied 
after the quiet burgher's pattern ? 

* Zimmevmamrs Ilistoiy of M;in, b. 3. 



PRESENT INEFFICIENCY OF EDUCATION. 15 

But we will venture to hope the opposite ; the school- 
master and tutor is ever afterwards connected with the 
nobleman, as God with nature ; concerning which Sen- 
eca justly writes, Semel jussit, semper paret, — i. e. the 
tutor's study is very soon closed, and the antechamber 
and audience-hall opened. 

In order not to fall into the error of those who intro- 
duce the bird Phoenix, and the man in the moon uuwived, 
I have here in my thoughts girls also, on whom, as on 
doves and canary-birds, false colors are painted by gov- 
ernesses, as well as by tutors, which the first rain or 
moulting removes. But, as has been said, every woman 
becomes in time something peculiar ; a beautiful Idioticon 
of her many provinces of language. 

§11. 

Through long teaching, to which no advance of the 
pupil is sufficiently proportioned, schoolmasters of under- 
standing may arrive at the question : " How will the poor 
scholar be able to walk in the right path without our 
leading-strings, since even with them he runs into error ? " 
— and also at this wish : " God ! that we could but wind 
him up, and fix him, exactly like an astronomical hun- 
dred-yeared chronometer, so that he might show the 
hours, and positions of the planets and everything quite 
accurately, long after our death ! " — and consequently at 
this opinion : " that they were in fact the soul of his inner 
man, and had to raise his every limb, or were at least, 
his supporting mould, in which he ought not merely to 
carry his broken arm, as in a gentle bandage, but also his 
leg, his head, and his entrails, so as to be completely 
strengthened." If the tutor accompany his young master 
to the university, the one goes into much good society 



l6 LEVANA. 

Avithout the other : and if thej both at last set off on 
tlieir travels, the young gentleman goes into much of a 
suspicious nature, and the tutor ends his anxiety, — 
which resembles the anxiety of a mother, as to how the 
poor naked fostus can exist, when it comes into this cold 
blowing world, and is no longer nourished by her blood. 

Truly your singing-bird of a pupil will continue to 
whistle for you through the night ; because, by a night- 
light, that is, by an education out of season, you delude 
him into the belief of an artificial daylight; but when he 
once flies into the open air, he will then only arrange his 
notes and sound them at the general break of day. 

If we place ourselves on another eminence, to contem- 
plate thence the directions, fears, and demands of teachers, 
we almost feel tempted to drive them down, especially 
because they, the educators, assume and presume so much ; 
that is, they do not take and set before them the great 
world-plan as their school-plan, nor the all-educator as an 
example to the poor hedge-schoolmaster man, — but do so 
anxiously endeavor, with their narrow views, to assist the 
infinite Pedagogiarch (Prince of teachers), — who per- 
mits sun to revolve round sun, and child round father, and 
so the child's and father's father are alike, — as if human- 
ity, neglected for thousands of years, were laid before 
them, hidden nook creators, like warm wax, on which 
they had to impress their own individual induration, to 
produce future indurations ; so that they might as re-cre- 
ators agreeably surprise the creator with a living sf'xl and 
paste cabinet of their coats of arms and heads. 

A long period, and here again a long period. 

§ 12. 
None of all my hearers, of whom I am the nearest, can 



PRESENT INEi^FICIENCY OF EDUCATION. 17 

have forgotten that at the commencement I asked why so 
much at present in Germany is written about education, 
and grounded upon it, as I also myself intend to lay some 
printed ideas on the subject before the public. I answer, 
for this reason ; because by cultivation all humanity has 
become a speaking machine, and the flesh a word. The 
more education, the more notions ; the less action, the more 
speech ; man is becoming a man by profession, as there 
were formerly Christians by profession ; and the ear his 
sensorium comynune. The beggar, for instance, passes by 
the great citizen unnoticed ; the one has fled from the 
other, not merely in dee<l, but beyond that, in word ; just 
as battles, pestilences, and such like, pass over us only as 
gentle sounds. Therefore is poetry so beneficial as a 
counterbalance to civilization, because it draws an artistic 
life round the thin shadows, and erects on the battle-field 
of mere sensuous views its own glorious visions. But as 
the German spends no time so willingly as a time for con- 
sideration, — to the most important step he made, namely, 
that into life, he took an eternity of consideration, — he 
prefers steady, slow writing, to quick hither and thither 
roving speech ; unlike the Southerns, be is less a speech- 
loving than a writing-loving people, as his registries and 
book-shelves prove. " A word, a roan," * means now 
" black on white, a man." Writing and feet, or clothing 
and body, are now as distinct from one another as shoe 
and foot, which, as a measure, mean with us the same 
thing. It all depends on one little stroke, whether Cbr\st 
is God or not ; namely, on the well-known passage, 
1 Tim. iii. 16, in the Alexandrine copy, where a little 
stroke with the back of the pen changes OC into eC 

* A common proverbial expression, signifying that no Avritten coq» 
tract is necessary \Then a man has given his Tvord. — Tk. 



l8 LEVANA. 

(Oeo's), nnd upon an " Or " in Carolina, whether a man 
shall be hanged or not. 

But now if the inner being of the cultivated man is 
merely composed, like some drawings, of letters and 
words, then enough can never be said of and in education, 
since the consciousness of having separated the inner life 
into ideas, consequently into words, secures the certainty 
of being able again to reconstruct it by means of the 
separated component parts, that is, by means of words ; 
in short, to educate through the means of speech, by the 
pen and the tongue. " Draw," said Donatello to the 
sculptors, " and you will be able to do the rest." " Speak," 
say we to teachers, " and you will show how to act." 

As every kind of existence only propagates itself by 
itself; for example, deeds only by deeds, words by words, 
education by education ; we will, excellent fellow-labor- 
ers, cheer and strengthen ourselves in the hope that our 
teaching may spiritually reward us by the elevation of 
our pupils into teachers, who may hereafter speak more 
extendedly with others ; and that our Johanneum-Paulli- 
num may serve as an educational institution for many 
educational institutions, while we send forth from our 
school-gates matured house-tutors, school-keepers, and cate- 
chisers, to produce their equals in good school-houses, — 
not Cyruses, but Cyropedias, and Cyropedagogiarchs. 

§ 13. 

I now turn to the most worshipful fathers of the city, 
our supporters and school-archs, not only with thanks, but 
also with entreaties. There remains, namely, in the most 
unpractical men and speakers a something harsh and 
real, — it is called, harshly enough, stomach, — which, 
from selfishness, values in the tongue only its imports, 



PRESENT INEFFICIENCY OF EDUCATION. I9 

not its exports. Enough ; every one possesses this mem- 
ber ; and it is tliis especially that makes us wish our 
school might be raised into a finance or industrial school 
for all those who received their incomes from it, so that 
every one who as scholar subscribed to it, may gladly 
again enter it in order to be paid as teacher. Moreover 
our school book-shop, less truly school-library, and our 
school-purse, yea, and our school widow's fund, might be 
well supported ; and so of everything else, for the only 
school sickness which teachers have is hunger, an evil for 
which the state should supply domestic means, or so called 
housekeeper's provision. 

But since all of us, especially as educators of youth, 
wish to live for something fairer and more enduring than 
our dinner of black soup, for which we must first, all day 
long distribute whipping-soup, I venture, unabashed, to 
prefer the proud request, that the desk from which the 
third master, and music-teacher, as well as myself, have 
to propound the needful instruction, may be newly colored, 
merely like a book, or a Prussian post-house, black and 
white, and that the Lyceum may receive, if not the name 
gymnasium, yet the epithet royal, and that we may all, as 
far as is possible, be addressed by the title of professors. 
Perhaps the school friendship, which has hitherto con- 
fined itself to the scholars, might then be extended 
to the teachers. Fiat I — Dixi ! 

§14. 

Scarcely had the author delivered the inaugural dis- 
course he had before composed, than so much of a resig- 
nation speech was found in it, that they afforded him 
a fair opportunity to deliver this last, and to explain him- 
self more at large, by removing and dismissing him a few 



20 LEVANA. 

days afterwards. Thereby he was placed in a position tb 
take leave of his fellow-teachers as publicly as he had 
received his dismissal, and at the same time to choose as 
text for his short farewell discourse — the educational 
chair (which he mounted for the second and last time), 
and to impress upon them its importance. 



CHAPTER III. 

IMPORTANCE OF EDUCATION. 
§15. 

MOST honored brothers in office ! In laying down 
my short-held office with a certain consoling con- 
sciousness that none of those intrusted to my charge will 
ever stand forth to reproach me with an erroneous plan 
of teaching, or with hours of instruction gossiped away, I 
can find no theme for a farewell, more connected with the 
subject, than the consideration how deeply a good educa- 
tion penetrates into the heart of the age ; and I choose 
this the more readily, because it will give me an oppor- 
tunity to place in a new light much that the day before 
yesterday was laid down by my predecessor in this desk, 
the deliverer of the inaugural discourse, — for here I do 
not venture to speak of myself in any other way since 
my dismissal. 

It shall only be proved that he advanced mere soph- 
isms, which originally, according to Leibnitz, signified 
only exercises in wisdom. 

" For what other reason," he asks, " do men now write 



IMPORTANCE OF EDUCATION. 21 

go much about education, than because," he answers, 
" our whole existence has passed into words, and words so 
easily, by means of tongues and ears, into the soul." But 
is this, pray, anything different from what I myself main- 
tain ? We shall see. 

§ 16. 

No former age or people is to be compared with any 
since the invention of printing ; for since that time there 
have been no more isolated states, and consequently no 
isolated influence of the state on its component parts. 
Strangers and returned travellers, whom Lycurgus ex- 
cluded from his republic, like episodes and the interven- 
tion of gods from the dramatic unities, now traverse every 
country under the name of missals and waste paper. No 
one is any longer alone, not even an island in the most 
distant sea ; thence comes it that the political balance of 
power of many states, collected under one arm of the 
balance, is now first mooted. Europe is an interlaced, 
misgrown, banyan forest, round which the other quarters 
of the world creep, like parasite plants, and nourish 
themselves on its decayed parts. Books form a universal 
republic, a union of nations, or a society of Jesus, in a 
nobler sense, or a humane society, whereby a second or 
duplicate Europe arises ; which, like London, lies in sev- 
eral counties and districts. As now, on the one side, the 
book-pollen flying everywhere, brings the disadvantage 
that no people can any longer produce a bed of flowers 
true and unspotted with foreign colors ; — as now no state 
can be any longer formed purely, slowly, and by degrees 
from itself, but, like an Indian idol, composed of different 
animals, must see the various members of the neighbor- 
ing states mingled with its growth; — so, on the other 



22 * LEVANA. 

side, through the ecumenic council of the book-world, the 
Bpirit of a provincial assembly can no longer slavishly 
enchain its people, and an invisible church frees it from 
the visible one. And therefore we educate now with 
some hope for the age, because we know that the spoken 
word of the German teacher is re-echoed by the printed 
page ; and that the citizen of the world, under the super- 
vision of the universal republic, will not sink into the 
citizen of an injurious state, all the more because, though 
books may be dead yet glorified men, their pupils will 
ever hold themselves as their living relatives. 

That the age writes so much on education, shows at 
once its absence and the feeling of its importance. Only 
lost things are cried about the streets. The German 
state itself no longer educates sufficiently ; consequently 
the teacher should do it in the nursery, from the pulpit, 
and from the desk. The forcing-houses in Rome and 
Sparta are destroyed, — in Sinai and in the Arabian 
desert some few yet stand, — the old circle, that the state 
should plan and direct the education, and this again act 
on that, has been very much rectified, or indeed squared, 
by the art of printing ; for now men, elevated above all 
states, educate states ; dead men, for instance, like Plato ; 
just as in the deep old morning-world, according to the 
saga, angels with glories wandered about, guided, like 
children, the new men who had sprung out of the ruins, 
and, having ended their instruction, vanished into heaven. 
The earth, according to Zach's ingenious idea, has been 
formed from congregated moons ; one moon striking on 
the American side, drove the deluge over the old world ; 
the sharp-pointed, wildly-up-piled Switzerland is nothing 
more than a visible moon, that once tumbled from its 
pure ether down to the earth, — and so there is in intel- 



IMPORTANCE OF EDUCATION. 23 

lectual Europe, far more than in any age or quarter of 
the world not addicted to printing, a congregation of soul- 
worlds, or of world-souls, sent or fallen from heaven. 
The great man has now a higher throne, and his crown 
shines over a wider plain ; for he works not only by 
action, but also by writing, — not only by his word, but 
also, like thunder, by an echo. So one mind influences its 
neighboring minds, and through them the masses ; as 
many little ships draw a large one into harbor, so infe- 
rior minds bring the great one to shore, that it may be 
unladen. 

§ 17. 

"My predecessor, however, might grant or add much ; 
namely, that if the great body of authors have gi'adually 
assumed the educational position once held by quacks and 
fortune-tellers, the great advancing mass of the people, 
which so easily overpowers, in its vast ocean, the early 
teaching of childhood, has itself changed and increased. 
" Libraries, and two yearly book-fairs — not including 
the one of reprints at Frankfort — surpass, I should think, 
a few school-books and their expounders," the deliverer 
of the address might, and probably does, say. But a 
principal point here must not be overlooked. 

It is indubitable that everything impresses man either 
formingly or improvingly ; — so that, I think, not merely 
an assembly of people and of books, and great electric 
effusions in his heaven's equator discompose him, but also 
tTiat damp weather unnerves him, — hence it is certain that 
no man can take a walk without bringing home an influ- 
ence on his eternity ; every spur, every star of heaven 
and of knighthood, every beetle, every trip or touch of the 
hand, as certainly engraves itself upon us, as the gentle 



24 LEVANA. 

dew-dix)p, or the hanging of a mist, affects the granite 
mountains. But just as certainly, on the other hand, is 
this assertion necessary ; that the strength of every 
impression depends on our condition yesterday, to-day, 
and to-morrow." For the human being assimilates more 
spiritual food, the less he has hitherto received ; as he 
never grovrs more i-apidly and disproportionately to the 
given nourishment than as fostus : but, after he has 
reached the point of satiety, he rejects so much that it is 
well the brief youth of the individual is compensated by 
the eternal youth of humanity, whose point of satiety is 
marked on a scale which takes centuries and nations for 
the fractions of its lines. 

On this account education is always counselled to do 
as much as possible during the first year of life ; for it can 
then effect more with half the power than it can in the 
eighth with double, when the sense of freedom is aroused, 
and all the conditions of being indefinitely multiplied. 
As farmers believe it most advantageous to sow in mist, 
so the first seeds of education should fall in the first and 
thickest mist of life. 

In the first place have regard to morality ! The inner 
man is, like the negro, born white, and only colored black 
by life. If in mature years great examples of moral 
worth pass by without influencing our course of life more 
than a flying comet that of the earth, yet in the deep 
heart of childhood the first inner or outer object of love, 
injustice, &c., throws a shadow or a light immeasurably 
far along its years ; and as, according to the elder theolo- 
gians, we only inherited Adam's first sin, not his other 
gins, since in one fall we copied every fall ; so the first 
fall and the first flight influence us our whole life long. 
For in this early moment the Eternal works the second 



IMPORTANCE OF EDUCATION. 25 

miracle -. the gift of life was the first. It is then that the 
god-man is conceived and born of human nature ; that 
self-consciousness, whereby a responsible being first ap- 
pears, may be boldly called a conscience and a god, — ant. 
unblessed is the hour in which this growing human bein<. 
finds no unspotted conception, but in the moment of birtl 
the Saviour and his Judas meet. Too little attention has 
been paid to this one invaluable moment, its environments 
and its fruits. There are men who can remember far 
back to this bounding hour of existence, in which their 
self-consciousness suddenly burst through the clouds like 
a sun, and wonderfully revealed a beaming universe. 
Life, especially moral life, has a flight, then a leap, then a 
step, then a halt ; each year renders a man less easy to 
convert, and a missionary can effect less on a wicked 
sexagenarian than an auto-da-fe. 

§18. 

"What is true of the heart of the inner man is true also 
of his eye. If the former, like an ancient Christian 
church, must be turned towards the morning of child- 
hood ; the latter, like a Grecian temple, receives its 
greatest light from the entrance and from above. For, 
in regard to intellectual education, the child walks hand 
in hand with a nature which never returns ; this nature 
is hitherto a wintry desert full of spring buds : wherever 
a sunbeam strikes it (for all teaching is warming into life 
rather than sowing), there the green leaves burst forth, and 
the whole child's life consists of warm creation days. 

Two forces are at work : first, childlike trust, that im- 
bibing power without which there could be no education 
and no language, but the child would resemble a bird 
taken too late from the nest, which must starve because it 
2 



26 LEVANA. 

will not open its bill to the hand which brings it food 
But this trust shows itself only in the minority, and sleeps 
in the mass of men and years. The second power is ex- 
citability. As in the physical, so in the spiritual child, it 
exists in the highest degree in the physical and spiritual 
morning of life, and decreases with age, until at last noth- 
ing in the empty world excites the worn-out man except 
the future. Then the whole universe may labor at, and 
press its marks upon the man, but on the hardened matter 
only weak impressions remain. The spirit of his age and 
nation may work unceasingly on the child; at first his 
only teachers are the age and nation. Moravians, Qua- 
kers, and especially Jews, give an influence to education 
which predominates over the surrounding dissimilar ages 
and people : and although even they are influenced by 
the spirit of the age and of the multitude, yet it impresses 
them much more slightly than the masses who are differ- 
ently educated. And however the spirit of the age may 
move and turn the heart, that little world, yet, like all 
balls revolving on themselves, it retains two innate im- 
movable poles, — the good and the bad. 

§ 19. 
Moreover, the whole mass of people does not, as my 
predecessor seems to assert, rush on the individual human 
being. Only some few in later, as in early hfe affect the 
formation of our characters ; the multitude passes by like 
a distant army. One friend, one teacher, one beloved, 
one club, one dining-table, one work-table, one house, are, 
in our age, the nation and national spirit influencing the 
individual, while the rest of the crowd passes him without 
leaving a trace behind. But when do individuals affect 
us so powerfully as in childhood ? or when so long — for 



IMPORTANCE OF EDUCATION. 27 

in education, as in law,* long means ten years, — as in 
the first decade ? The waves of the ocean, besides, be- 
fore reaching the child, break, against four walls, which 
encompass the water of his education or crystallization : 
father, mother, brothers and sisters, and a few extra peo- 
ple, are his forming world and mould. But all this de- 
ducted, we must remember in education that its power, 
like that of the spirit of the age, which must not be meas- 
ured by individuals, but by the concentrated mass or ma- 
jority, — must be judged, not by the present, but by the 
future: a nation or century, educated by the same method, 
presses down the balance quite differently from a casual 
individual. But we, as ever, desire that fate, or the Time 
Spirit, should answer our inquiries by return of post. 

§20. 
I have in this manner, at least I hope so, laid my own 
opinion, as well as his, before my opponent and predeces- 
sor with a respect which is not so common among the 
learned body, as many an opponent of an opponent be- 
lieves. For the little that he adds about the absorption 
of the individual in the mass merits not contradiction, but 
affirmation. The uniformity of the masses permits many 
irregularities in the individual ; and although the tables 
of mortality are correct, no one hopes and fears only by 
them. On the globe itself mountains disappear, and from 
these at a distance, the stony path ; but he who travels it 
sees it clearly enough. And when the dear good man, 
along with his complaints of the ineffectiveness of good 
education, gives way to complaints of the influence of 
bad education, he then clearly proves by a capability to 
be ill-educated, a capability to be well-educated ; and so 
* Longum tempus est decern annorum, Homm: prompt. 



28 



LEVANA. 



education is to be reproached with no want, but the want 
of correct tables of the perturbations of a Httle wandering 
star, caused by the revolutions of other planets ; and will 
we not readily concede this ? 

And now, worthy schoolarchy, I should wish to know 
what further I have to say from this honorable place ? 




SECOND FRAGMENT, 

Chap. I. Spirit and Principle of Education, §§ 21 - 24. — Chap. II. 
The Individuality of the Ideal Man, §§ 25-30. — Chap. III. On 
the Spirit of the Age, §§ 31-35. — Chap. IV. Religious Educa- 
tion, §§ 36-38. 

CHAPTER I. 

SPIRIT AND PRINCIPLE OP EDUCATION. 




§21. 

HE end desired must be known before the waj. 
All means or arts of education will be, in the 
first instance, determined bj the ideal or ar- 
chetype we entertain of it. But there floats 
before common parents, instead of one archetype, a whole 
picture cabinet of ideals, which they impart bit by bit, 
and tattoo into their children. If the secret variances 
of a large class of ordinary fathers were brought to 
light, and laid down as a plan of studies, and reading 
catalogue for a moral education, they would run some- 
what after this fashion : — In the first hour pure mo- 
rality must be read to the child, either by myself, or the 
tutor ; in the second, mixed morality, or that which may 
be applied to one's own advantage ; in the third, " Do you 
not see that your father does so and so ? " in the fourth, 
" You are Httle, and this is only fit for grown-up people " ; 
in the fifth, " The chief matter is that you should succeed 



30 LEVANA. 

in the world, and become something in the state " ; in the 
sixth, " Not the temporary, but the eternal, determines the 
worth of a man"; in the seventh, "Therefore rather suffer 
injustice, and be kind" ; in the eighth, " but defend your- 
self bravely if any one attack you" ; in the ninth, " Do not 
make such a noise, dear child " ; in the tenth, " A boy 
must not sit so quiet " ; in the eleventh, " You must obey 
your parents better " ; in the twelfth, " and educate your- 
self." So by the hourly change of his principles the 
father conceals their untenableness and one-sidedness. 
As for his wife, she is neither like him, nor yet like that 
harlequin who came on to the stage with a bundle of pa- 
pers under each arm, and answered to the inquiry what 
he had under his right arm, " orders," and to what he had 
under his left, "counter-orders"; but the mother might 
be much better compared to a giant Briareus, who had a 
hundred arms, and a bundle of papers under each. 

This government of the demigods, so frequently and 
so suddenly changed, proves clearly not only the absence, 
but also the necessity and the right of a superior god : for 
in the generality of souls the ideal, without which men 
would sink down into four-footed beasts, reveals itself 
rather by inner discord than unison, rather by judgments 
on others than on itself. But with children, the result 
of this may be, and often has been, various and half-col- 
ored pupils, whom (unless some rare pecuharity makes 
them hard and uninjurable) the spirit of the age, or the 
accident of necessity and pleasure, can easily break with 
its wheel, or even twine round it. The rr ajority of edu- 
cated men are, therefore, at present an illumination which 
burns off by fits and starts in the rain, shining with inter- 
rupted forms, and depicting broken characters. 

But the bad and impure spirits of educational systems 



SPIRIT AND PRINCIPLE OF EDUCATION. 31 

nre jet to be reduced into other divisions. Many parents 
educate their children only for themselves, — that is, to 
be pretty blocks, or soul-alarums, which are not set to 
move or sound when stillness is required. The child has 
merely to be that on which the teacher can sleep most 
softly or drum most loudly ; who, having something else 
to do and to enjoy, wishes to be spared the trouble of 
education, duly but most unreasonably expecting its fruits. 
Hence these dull sluggards are so often angry because 
the child is not at once cleverer, more consistent, and 
gentler than themselves. Even zealous children's friends, 
like statesmen, often resemble inflammable air, which, it 
is true, gives light itself, but in so doing extinguishes 
every other : at least a child must often be to them, what 
a favorite assistant must be to a minister, sometimes only 
the hand which copies, sometimes a head which can work 
by itself. 

Related to those teachers who wished to be machine- 
makers are the educators for appearances and political 
usefulness. Their maxims, thoroughly carried out, would 
only produce pupils, or rather sucklings, passively obedi- 
ent, boneless, well-trained, patient of all things, — the 
thick, hard, human kernel would give place to the soft, 
sweet fruit-pulp, — and the child's clod of earth, into 
which growing life should breathe a divine spirit, would 
be kept down and manured as though it were but a corn- 
field, — the edifice of the state would be inhabited by 
mere spinning-machines, calculating-machines, printing 
and pumping apparatus, oil-mills, and models for mills, 
pumps, and spinning-machines, &c. Instead of every 
child, born without past and without future, beginning in 
the year one, and bringing with him a first new-year, the 
state, forsooth, must step into and usurp the place of a 



32 LEVANA. 

remote posterity, which alone could make him spiritually, 
as well as physically, young again, and substitute for him 
a system of teaching which only stops his wheels and 
surrounds them like hardened ice. 

Nevertheless the man comes before the citizen, and 
our future, beyond the world as well as in our own minds, 
is greater than both : how then have parents, who in the 
child clothe and bind up the man into a servant, — for 
instance, into custom-house officers, kitchen-purveyors^ 
jurists, &c., — obtained the right to multiply themselves 
otherwise than physically, instead of begetting spiritual 
embryos ? Can care of the body impart a right of spirit- 
ual starvation, or of good-living, such as the Devil would 
prescribe a soul, since nobody can outbalance, nay, not 
even balance, a soul ? The ancient German and Spartan 
custom of killing weak-bodied children is not much cru- 
eller than that of propagating weak-minded ones. 

§22. 

Usefulness to others is only separated from usefulnefi 
to one's self, as dishonesty is from uncharitableness : bot^ 
are united in self-love. Hedgerows and Hercules-pillari, 
however perfect, are blamable as soon as they diminifh 
the free world of a future man. If Mengs, by slavery 
of body and soul, made his son, Raphael Mengs, into a 
painter, — according to Winkelmann, the Grecian stafc'is 
only reached art through and for freedom, — he did b it 
adopt the old Egyptian custom, that the son /nust folkw 
the trade of his father, only in its higher branches. 

Much of this holds good with regard to domeo'ift 
orphan-house chaplains, who transform the whole cWl- 
dren's training into a Church-training and Bible-ins-Utufirn, 
and make free, happy children into bowed-dow > clcisf "r 



SPIRIT AND PRINCIPLE OF EDUCATION. 33 

novices. For the human being is not formed to grow 
altogether upwards, like plants and deer's horns ; nor yet 
altogether downwards, like feathers and teeth ; but, like 
muscles, at both ends at once: so that Bacon's double 
motto for kings, " Remember that thou art a man, remem- 
ber that thou art a god, or vice-god," may serve also for 
children ! 

Education can neither entirely consist of mere unfold- 
ing in general, or, as it is now better called, excitement, 

— for every continued existence unfolds, and every bad 
education excites, just as oxygen positively irritates, — 
nor in the unfolding of all the powers, because we cati 
never act upon the whole amount of them at once ; as 
little as in the body susceptibility and spontaneity, or the 
muscular and nervous system, can be strengthened at the 
same time. 

§23. 

A purely negative education, such as that of Rousseau 
only seems to be, would at once contradict itself and 
reality, as much as an organic living body full of powers 
of growth without means of excitement : even the few 
wild children who have been captured received a positive 
education from the raging and flying animals around 
them. A child's coffin only can represent a negative 
hedge-school, prince's school, and school-door. The pure- 
ly natural man — whom Rousseau sometimes, indeed 
very often, confounds with the ideal man, because both 
are equally pure and distinct from the mere worldly man 

— grows entirely by excitement. Rousseau, in the first 
place, prefers arousing and influencing the child by things 
rather than by men, by impressions rather than by dis- 
courses ; and, in the second, recommends a more healthy 
and useful series of excitements, whilst his predecessors 

2* c 



34 LEVANA. 

in teaching had hastened to use upon the susceptible 
nature of children the most powerful excitements, such 
as God, Hell, and the Rod ! Only give the souls of 
children free passage from the limhus patrum et infantum, 
and Nature, he seems to think, will unfold herself. This, 
indeed, she does everywhere, and at all times, but only 
in ages, countries, and souls which possess a marked 
individuality. 

§24. 

Perhaps we may find the centre and focus of these 
crossing lines and beams from this point of view : — If a 
modern Greek, without any knowledge of the mighty past, 
were depicting the present condition of his enslaved race, 
he would find it approaching the highest step of civiliza- 
tion, morality, and other excellences, until a magic stroke 
revealed to his astonished eye Greece in the Persian 
war, or Athens in its glory, or fruitful Sparta, like an 
empire of the dead, like Elysian fields. What a differ- 
ence in the same nation, vast as that between gods and 
men ! Nevertheless, those gods are not genii, nor in any 
way exceptions, but a people, consequently the majority 
and average of talents. When in history we look round 
on the heights and mountain ranges where glorified 
nations dwell, and then down into the abysses where 
others lie enchained, we say to ourselves. The heights 
that a multitude has reached thou also ^anst reach, if 
thou canst not descend into the depths. The spiritual 
existence that a nation, a majority of any people, has 
embodied and showed forth in glory must dwell and 
breathe in every individual, else could he not recognize 
in it a kindred being. 

And so, indeed, it is. Every one of us has within him 
an ideal man, which he strives, from his youth upwards, 



SPIRIT AND PRINCIPLE OF EDUCATION. 35 

to cherish or to subdue. This holy soul-spirit every one 
beholds most clearly in the blooming time of all his pow- 
ers, — in the season of youth. If only every one were 
distinctly conscious of what he once wished to become, of 
how different and much nobler a path and goal his open- 
ing eye, compared with his fading one, beheld ! For so 
soon as we believe in any contemporaneous growth of the 
physical and spiritual man, we must also let the blooming 
season of both occur simultaneously. Consequently, his 
own ideal being will appear most clearly to the man 
(though it be only in vague desires and dreams) in the 
full bloom of youth. And does not this show itself in 
the meanest soul, which, though sunk during its pilgrim- 
age through sensual and covetous affections, yet once 
attained a higher hope, and stood within the gates of 
heaven ? At a later period, in the multitude, the ideal 
being fades day by day, and the man becomes, sinking 
and overpowered, the mere present, a creature of neces- 
sity and neighborhood. But the universal complaint, 
" What might I not have become ! " confesses the present 
existence, or the past existence, of an older Adam in 
paradise, along with and before the old Adam. 

But the ideal man comes upon the earth as an anthro- 
pohthe (a petrified man) : to break this stony covering 
away from so many limbs, that the rest can liberate them- 
selves, — this is, or should be, education. 

The same normal being who, in every noble soul, re- 
mains as house-tutor, and silently teaches, should be 
outwardly manifested in the child, and make itself inde- 
pendent, free, and strong. But first of all we must 
discover what it is. The ideal man of Fenelon, — so full 
of love and full of strength, — the ideal man of Cato the 
younger, — so full of strength and full of love, — could 



36 LEVANA. 

never exchange or metamorphose themselves hito jach 
other without spiritual suicide. Consequently, «rotii'*ation 
has in 



CHAPTER II. 

TO DISCOVER AND TO APPRECIATE THE INDIVIDUi t TTY Oi 
THE IDEAL MAN. 

§25. 

LET a needful breathing-space be granted here ! I» 
most languages, like a symbol, the adjective and 
verb " good " and " be " are irregular. Physical powei 
expresses its superfluity in the variety of genera ; hence 
the temperate zone maintains only 130 distinct quadru- 
peds, but the torrid 220. The higher kinds of life sepa- 
rate, according to Zimmermann, into more species ; thus, 
beyond the five hundred species of the mineral kiigdom, 
lies the animal world with seven million. It is £0 with 
minds. Instead of the uniformity of savage nations in 
different ages and countries, for instance, of the American 
Indians and the ancient Germans, is seen the ntiany- 
branched, varied forms of civilized people in the same 
climate and period : just as the art of gardening multi- 
plies sorts of flowers in different colors, or time separate* 
a long strip of land in the ocean into islands. In so fa* 
a meaning may be attached to the saying of the school 
men, that every angel is its own species. 

§26. 
Every educator, even the dullest, admits this, and 
imprints on his pupils this reverence for peculiarities, 
that is, for his own ; at the same time he laboi^s i idustri- 



INDIVIDUALITY OF THE IDEAL MAN 37 

oaslj to secure this point, — that each be nothing else 
than his own step-son or bastard self. He allows himself 
as much individuality as is necessary to eradicate that of 
others, and plant bis own in its stead. If, in general, 
every man is secretly his own copying-machine, which he 
applies to others, and if he willingly draws all into ghostly 
and spiritual relationship with himself as soul's cousins, — 
iu<y for instance. Homer gladly converted the four quarters 
of the world into Homerides and Homerists, and Luther 
into Lutherans, — much more will the teacher strive in 
the defenceless, unformed souls of children to impress 
and reproduce himself, and the father of the body en- 
deavor to be also the father of the spirit. God grant 
it may seldom succeed ! And most fortunately it does 
not prosper ! It is only mediocrity which supplants thafc 
of others by its own ; that is, one imperceptible individu- 
ality by another equally imperceptible : hence the multi- 
tude of imitators. From a wood-cut some thousand 
impressions may easily be taken j but from a copper-plate 
only a tithe of that number. 

It were indeed too pitiable for Europe if it were alto- 
gether sown with Tituses, as every Titus secretly wishes, 
or with Sempronioses, as the Semproninses desire I What 
a thick, dead sea would be floating along from the usuri- 
ously-increasing resemblance of teachers and pupils 1 

§27. 

As every teacher, even the rigidest, admits that he 
highly values two strongly marked individualities, — 
namely, that before the deluge which formed his own, 
and that own itself, — and regards them as the two 
mountain ranges which give birth to the streams below 
and the vales of Tempe ^ and as, moreover, every self 



38 LEVANA. 

taught man maintains that everything remarkable in the 
world has been created by adding and subtracting, but 
Mot by transplanting, individualities, some other illusion 
than that of mere selfishness must be at the foundation 
of this disregard of the peculiarities of others. 

§28. 
It is, in truth, the excusable error that confuses the 
Vieal with ideals ; and which, had it lived during the 
week of creation, would have created all angels, all Eves, 
^r all Adams. But although there is only one Spirit of 
Poetry, there are many different forms in which it can 
incorporate itself, — comedies, tragedies, odes, and the 
thin wasp's body of the epigram ; so the same moral 
genius may become flesh, — here as Socrates, there as 
Luther, here as Phocion, there as John. As no finite 
can truly reflect the infinite ideal, but only narrowly 
mirror it back in parts, such parts must necessarily be 
infinitely various ; neither the dew-drop nor the mirror 
nor the ocean reflects the sun in all its greatness, but 
they each represent it round and bright. 

§29. 

/ — God excepted, who is at once the great original / 
and Thou — is the noblest as well as the most incompre- 
hensible thing which language expresses or which we 
contemplate. It is there at once, like the whole world of 
truth and conscience, which, without I, is nothing. We 
must ascribe the same thing to God as to unconscious 
matter when we think of the being of the one, the exist- 
ence of the other. A second / is, in other respects, even 
more inconceivable to us than a first. 

Every / is a personal existence, consequently a spirit- 
ual individuality, — for a bodily one is so extended tb-^' 



INDIVIDUALITY OF THE IDEAL MAN. 39 

a portion of the sky, earth, city, must belong to it as a 
body ; — this personal existence does not consist in 
Fichte's theory of rendering the / objectively subjective, 
that is, 'in the change of the reflection of what was first 
mirrored, and which every^vhere returning cuts off all 
number and time, so that nothing is explained by it, no 
reflection by its counter-reflection. Further, it does not 
consist in an accidental weighing backwards and forwards 
of single powers ; for, first, to every embodied army 
a governing and controlling master-spirit is indispensa- 
ble; and, secondly, all distinct forces in organic con- 
nection rise and fall with the weather-glass, age, &c., 
alongside the unchanging individuality. 

But it is an inner sense of all senses ; as feeling is the 
sense common to the four external senses. It is that in 
others on which our reliance, friendship, or enmity rests, 
and is either an enduring inaptitude, or a capacity for the 
arts of poetry and thought. As the same incomprehen- 
sible organic unity, subjecting to itself disjointed matter, 
governs and acts differently in plants, in animals, and in 
their every variety, and multiplies itself in organic per- 
sonal existence, so also does the higher spiritual unity. 
The theological question of the schools, whether the God- 
man might not have appeared as a woman, a brute ani- 
mal, or a gourd, is symbolically affirmed by the infinite 
variety of individual existences in which the Divine 
Being manifests himself. It is that which unites all 
sesthetical, moral, and intellectual powers into one soul, 
and, like the material of light, itself invisible, gives and 
determines the many-colored visible universe, whereby 
first that philosophical pole-word ' practical reason, pure 
I ' ceases only to stand in the zenith of heaven like a 
pole-star which marks no north, and consequently no 
quarter of the world. 



40 LEVANA. 

\Vf s'hgull know better how to value and protect tliis 
spirit 'pf li/e, this individuality, if it always stood forth as 
strong"^y ass in the man of genius. For we all perceive 
how gi f^at a defeat of spirits would arise in a passive war 
of gian '« : if, for instance, Kant, RafFaelle, Mozart, Cato, 
Frederiik the Great, Charles the Twelfth, Aristophanes, 
Swift, Ta^-^o, and so forth, were all forced into the same 
press, and Wmed in the same mould. Even one man of 
genius, by t^ "» exchange and compensation of individual 
peculiarities, -^-^wld only become another, in a manner 
resembling the ^7»"<;ible union of two polypi. But if the 
primary faculty o^ ^n ordinary nature be broken, what 
can result from it Y'\*- a perpetual confused wandering 
about itself, — a hal* imitation arising in spite, not out of, 
itself, — a parasitical w-^r^ living on another beiKjg, the 
mimic of every new examr"^, the siave of evei^ master 
at his elbow ? If a human iy^ij^nr is once tlii^wn out of 
his own individuality into a fr^r^i^n one, tne centre of 
gravity that held together his whole '^D^.r 'world becomes 
movable and wanders from spot to sdp*, and one oscilla- 
tion passes into another. In the mean tiu«» the teacher 
has to separate from the individuality whic^ He ?lLo^i'^ to 
grow, another which he must either bend or guide." tiie 
one is that of the head, the other that of the hearu 
Every intellectual peculiarity, be it mathematical, artistic, 
philosophical, is a beating heart, which all teaching an»3 
gifts only serve as conducting veins to fill it with materia^ 
for working and motion. At this exact point more weight 
may be added to the preponderating weight of natural 
disposition ; and the teacher must not give, in the morn- 
ing of life, a sleeping draught — say to peculiar talents for 
art. The moral nature, however, must be quite differ- 
ently treated ; if that is melody, this is harmony : you 



INDIVIDUALITY OF THE IDEAL MAN. 4I 

must not enfeeble an Euler by ingrafting on him a 
Petrarch, nor the latter by the former ; for no intellectual 
power can become too great, and no painter too great a 
painter. But every moral faculty needs to have its 
boundaries fixed in order to the cultivation of its balan- 
cing powers : and Frederick the Great may take his flute, 
and Napoleon his Ossian. Here education may, for in- 
stance, deliver sermons on peace to the heroic character, 
and charge with electric thunder the disposition of a 
Siegwart. So one might — since, with girls, head and 
heart are reciprocal — frequently put a cookingrspoon into 
the band of the boy of genius, and into that of the little 
cook by birth some romantic feather from a poet's wing. 
For the rest, let it be a law that, as every faculty is holy, 
none must be weakened in itself, but only have its op- 
posing one aroused; by which means it is added har- 
moniously to the whole. So, for instance, a weakly 
affectionate heart must not be hardened, but its sense of 
honor and purity must be strengthened : the daring spirit 
must not be rudely checked and made timid, but only 
taught to be loving and prudent. 

The conditions may now be required of me, under 
which is to be formed the character of the child, and also 
that of the prize or ideal man into which he is to be 
fashioned. But for that purpose one book among the 
endless multitude of books would not serve ; moreover, 
the books must possess the rare gift of being interpreters 
of the dreams and symbols of the closely-folded child's 
chara^.ter ; which, in a child, who does not display every- 
thing matured as a grown-up man, but only budding, 
would be as difficult to discover as a lutterfly in the 
chrysalis to all who are not Swammerdams. But, alas ! 
three things are very difficult to discover and to impart, — 



+2 LEV AN A. 

to have a character, — to draw one, — to guess one. To 
oi^iiiiaiy teachers a naughtv trick seems a wicked nature, 
— a pimple or a pock-mark as parts of the countenance. 

If one must transhite the prize and ideal man into 
words, one might perhaps say, that it is the harmonious 
maximum of all individual quahties taken together, which, 
without regard to the resemblance of the harmony, is yet 
connected in all its different parts, as one tone in music is 
to another. TVliosoever now, out of the musical a b c d e 
f g, should change, for instance, a piece set in a to 6, 
would injure the piece much, but not so much as a teacher 
who would convert the ail-variously arranged natures of 
children into one uniform tone. 

§30. 

To elevate above the spirit of the age must be regarded 
as the end of education ; and this must stand clearly de- 
veloped before us ere we mark out the appointed road. 
The child is not to be educated for the present, — for this 
is done without our aid unceasingly and powerfully, — but 
for the remote future, and often in opposition to the 
immediate future. The spirit which is to be shunned 
must be known. Permit me, then, a 



THIKD CHAPTER, 

OK THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE. 

§ 31. 

^"^OU invoke the spirit of the age freely and boldly, 

1 but let it truly appear before us in your discourse, 

and do you answer I Since time separates into ages, as 



SPIRIT OF THE AGE. 43 

the rainbow into falling drops, indicate the greatness of 
the age of whose indwelling spirit you speak. Has it a 
century of duration ; and by what chronology is it reck- 
oned, — the Jewish, the Christian, the Turkish, or the 
French? Does not the expression " spirit of the century '* 
easily escape the lips of a man because he, born in a cen- 
tury, and partly measuring one with his life, really means 
nothing more by " age " than the little day-span which 
the eternal sun describes from the morning to the even- 
ing of his life ? Or does the age extend from one great 
event (the Reformation, for instance) to another, so that 
the spirit of the first vanishes as soon as the second is 
born ? And what revolution will be considered by you 
the animating one of the age, — a philosophical, a moral, a 
poetical, or a political one ? 

Further : is not every spirit of the age less changing 
than flying, — indeed, already flown ; what might be 
more properly called the spirit of that immediately pre- 
ceding ? For its traces presuppose that it is already gone, 
consequently gone further. And only from lofty heights 
can the backward road be surveyed, and the future 
estimated. 

But since the same period unfolds at the present time 
a totally different spirit in Saturn, — in his satellites, 
in his ring.<, — upon all the countless worlds of the pres- 
ent ; and again in London, Paris, Warsaw ; and since it 
follows that the present moment of time must have a 
million different spirits of the age, I would ask you 
where the invoked spirit of the age is clearly manifested, 
— in Germany, France, or where ? As before you 
found it difficult to mark out iis limits in time, so will 
you now to determine them m space. 

I partly spare you the great question which concerns 



44 LEVANA. 

every one, yourself among the number, — how you, how 
all encircled in the same age, can raise yourselves so far 
above its waves as to be able to observe its course, not 
merely to feel its dark, irresistible march ? And does not 
the stream which bears you lead into an ocean, whose 
movements you cannot measure, because it has no shore ? 

§32. 

What we call spirit of the age our ancestors called the 
end of the world, the latest times, signs of the last day, 
kingdom of the Devil and of Antichrist. Mere melancholy 
names ! No golden or innocent age ever called itself 
golden, but only expected one ; and an age of lead ex- 
pected one of arsenic : — only the past glitters, as sliips 
occasionally draw after them a shining train. But the 
former interpretations of dreams and gazings into the 
present — would that some one would collect such a dream- 
book of departed great spirits ! — teach us mistrust of 
those now made. If man, from the observation of the 
three quarters of the globe, could not prophetically con- 
struct the fourth from the combinations of matter, far less 
can he divine a future from the more complicated ones of 
spirit. For man is feeble and poor : his star-reading of 
the future — a mere strengthening or weakening of the 
present — sees only a crescent moon in the sky, which 
waxes and wanes in unison with him, but no sun. Every 
one regards his own life as the new-year's eve of time, 
and also, like the superstitious, his dreams, woven from 
memories, as prophecies for the year. Thence there al- 
ways comes, not the foretold good or evil, nor yet its 
opposite, but something quite different, which receives the 
prophecies and their objects as an ocean does the rivers, 
and reso^ res (hem into the circle of its waves. For, in 



SPIRIT OF THE AGE. 45 

the moment when you are prophesying in the desert, the 
fine seed-pollen of an oak falls upon the earth, and, in a 
century, grows up to be a forest. How, indeed, could 
man accurately divine any approaching age without at the 
same time knowing and depicting all after times? He, 
for instance, who, from the present course and position of 
the winds, clouds, and planets during one academical half- 
year could accurately guess the weather of a second, 
might and must be able, from the data he had foretold, to 
decipher the third season's weather, and from that every 
succeeding one, — supposing no intervention ; — but there 
do always intervene comets, earthquakes, the clearing of 
forests, or the growth of new ones, and all the other power 
of the Almighty. In the same way, before the eye of the 
seer, one century after another must be produced in regu- 
lar order, consequently thousands of years, and finally, the 
whole time which can dwell upon an earth ; supposing, 
as has been already said, nothing intervenes. But, heav- 
ens ! what is there does not intervene ! The prophet 
himself — and the freedom of the spiritual world — and 
the Almighty, who here withdraws and there sends forth 
spirits and suns. Thus it is that every one lives so com- 
pletely in a spiritual twilight (a beautiful word for that 
dusky time of day), that God himself decides which of 
the two contending lights shall gain the victory by a new 
one from the sun or the moon, which men so frequently 
anistake the one for the other. 

§33. 

How, indeed, were this foregoing two-and-thirtieth 
paragraph to be written or to be comprehended, if some- 
thing more were not added about it ; namely, a three-and- 
thirtieth which follows after it? The older the world 



46 LEVANA. 

grows, the more complacently can it, and will it, adopt 
the prophesying character of an elder. From the fore- 
world a spirit speaks an ancient language to us, which we 
should not understand if it were not born with us. It is 
the spirit of eternity, which judges and overlooks every 
spirit of time. And what does it say of the present ? 
Very hard words. — It says that the age can now more 
easily raise up a great people than a great man ; because 
the powerful union springing from civilization joins to- 
gether the men of one spirit, like the vapor-drops of a 
huge steam-engine ; so that even war is now only a war- 
game between two living creatures. Something, it says, 
must have decayed in our age, for even the mighty earth- 
quake of the Revolution, before which for centuries, as 
before a physical earthquake, an infinite multitude of 
worms had crept out of the ground and covered it, has 
produced and left behind it nothing greater than pretty 
wings on these said worms. The spirit of Eternity, 
which judges the heart and the world, strongly declares 
what spirit is wanting to the present men inspired by the 
senses, to these fire-worshippers of the passions, — the 
holy one of Him who is above the earth. The ruinsi of 
his temple sink low^er and lower into the present earth. 
Prayer is thought to draw along with it the false lights of 
fanaticism. The apprehension and belief in what ts be- 
yond the world, which formerly extended its roots under 
the foulest ages, bears no fruits in our pure thin air. If, 
formerly, religion was in war, there is now no longer war 
in religion, — there has grown for us out of the world a 
mighty edifice, out of etlier a cloud, out of God a mere 
power, out of heaven a coffin ! 

At last the spirit of Eternity holds up before us our 
shamelessness, by which we, in our darkness, have per- 



SPIRIT OF THE AGE. 47 

mitted to play, as a festive illumination, the flames of an- 
ger, love, and desire, from which all religions, all ancient 
nations, all great men, have held themselves aloof, or re- 
garded with shame : and it says that we, living only in 
our hate and hunger, like other decaying corpses, only 
retain our teeth uninjured, the instruments both of re- 
venge and enjoyment. Passion belongs of right to the 
sickness of the age: nowhere is found so much impa- 
tience, carelessness, indulgence towards self, and unrelent- 
ing selfishness towards others, as on the sick-bed. Now 
this century lies upon a sick-bed. As among the Spartans 
the men cut away a full prominent breast as something 
womanish, so is the same thing done now in spiritual mat- 
ters, under the same pretext ; and the heart must be as 
hard as the cavity of the breast above it. Finally, there 
are some very cultivated men who split themselves in 
opposite directions towards heaven and hell, as a salaman- 
der cut in two runs forward with its front, backwards with 
its hind part. 

§34. 

So speaks the severe spirit within us, the eternal one ; 
but it becomes milder if we hear it to the end. Every 
heartfelt lamentation and weeping over any age points, 
like a spring on a mountain, to some higher mountain or 
peak ; only those nations remain sunk in their lethargy 
who go in the same dull path from age to age, not lament- 
ing over themselves, but over others : and those who suffer 
from the mental falling-sickness of the French philosophy 
have, like bodily epileptics, no consciousness of their mal- 
ady, but only pride in their strength. Sorrow of the 
spirit (as Night, according to the Greeks) is the mother 
of gods ; though that of the body is a dark mist, bringing 
poison and death. The bold and soaring thought of tho 



48 LEVANA'. 

Talraudists — that even God prays, like that of the 
Greeks, that Jupiter was subject to fate — receives a 
meaning from the lofty, though often conquered longings of 
the soul, which the Infinite himself has planted within us. 
One religion after another fades away, but the religious 
sense, which created them all, can never become dead to 
humanity: consequently, it will only manifest and lead 
its future life in more purified forms. The saying of 
Tyrtfeus,* that God, in the commencement, appeared to 
men in their own likeness, then as a voice, and afterwards 
only in dreams, and by inspiration (or spiritual illumina- 
tion), has a beautiful signification for ours, and all future 
ages, if by dream we understand poetry, and by illumina- 
tion, philosophy. So long as the word God endures in a 
Language, will it direct the eyes of men upwards. It is 
with the Eternal as with the sun, which, if but its small- 
est part can shine uneclipsed, prolongs the day, and gives 
its rounded image in the dark chamber. Even in France, 
which could for a short time observe a total eclipse of the 
sun, arose a Chateaubriand, a St. Martin and his admir- 
ers, and other kindred spirits. Our present age is indeed 
a criticising and a critical one, wavering between the de- 
sire and the inability to believe, — a chaos of times strug- 
gling against one another : but even a chaotic world must 
have a centre, revolution round that point, and an atmos- 
phere ; there is no such thing as mere disorder and con- 
fusion, but even that presupposes its opposite in order to 
begin. The present religious wars on paper and in the 
brain — very different from former ones, which were 
tempests full of heat, rage, devastation, and fertilization — 
rather resemble the northern lights (thunder and light- 
ning of the higher and colder quarters of the sky), full of 
* Tyrtaeus de Apparitions Dei, c. 17. 



SPIRIT OF THE AGE. 49 

noisy lights without blows, full of strange shapes and full 
of frost, without rain and in the night. Does not, in fact, 
the bold self-consciousness — the life of this age — extend 
still further the original character of man and mind? 
And can the character of men, the mental waking, ever 
be too much awake ? At present it is onlj not sufficiently 
so ; for an object is necessary to reflection, as its absence 
is to thoughtlessness ; and the common minds of the age 
.■^re too impoverished to give a rich field to reflection. 
Bui; there is one strange, ever-returning spectacle : that 
every age has regarded the dawning of new hght as the 
destroying fire of morality; while that very age itself, 
with heart uninjured, finds itself raised one degree of 
light above the preceding ! Is it, perhaps, that as light 
travels faster than heat, and as it is more easy to work upon 
the head than on the heart, the burst of light, by its sud- 
denness, always appears inimical to the unprepared heart? 

To the present age is ascribed productiveness and 
changeableness of opinions, and at the same time indif- 
ference to opinions. But that cannot arise from this : no 
man in all corrupted Europe can be indifferent to truth 
as such ; for it, in the last resort, decides upon his life ; 
but every one is at last become cold and shy towards the 
erring teachers and preachers of truth. Take the hardest 
heart and brain which withers away in any capital city, 
and only give him the certainty that the spirit which 
approaches brings down from eternity the key which 
opens and shuts the so weighty gates of his life-prison, 
of death, and of heaven, — and the dried-up worldly man, 
so long as he has a care or a wish, must seek for a truth 
which can reveal to him that spirit. 

The present march of light indicates anything rather 
than standing still ; and it is only this which begets and 

3 D 



50 LEVANA. 

immortalizes poison, as it is on stagnant air that tempests 
and whirlwinds break. Certainly we are very little able 
to determine in what manner a brighter age than that we 
have experienced will be educed from the present troub- 
lous fermentation. Every vaiied age — and therefore 
our own — is only a spiritual climate for an approaching 
spiritual seed ; but we do not know what foreign seed 
heaven will cast into it. 

Every sin appears new and near, as in painting black 
stands out most strongly ; man is readily accustomed to 
the repetition of love, but not to the repetition of injustice. 
Thence every one regards his own age as morally worse, 
and intellectually better than it really is ; for in science 
the new is an advance : but in morals the new, as a con- 
tradiction to our inner ideals and our historic idols, is ever 
a retrogression. As in past ages the errors of nations, 
unlike decorative paintings, seem very distorted and 
shapeless, because distance hides from us their finer and 
true completeness ; so, on the other side, the black sin- 
stains of the past, of the Roman and Spartan, for example, 
show softened and rounded, and, as on a moon, the high 
rugged shadow of the past falls round and transparent on 
the present. For instance, if men estimate the worth of 
the age after a war, that most ancient barbarism of human- 
ity, and especially after the bad innovations consequent 
upon it, then the spirit of the age rises before this touch 
of death, in frightful illumination and distortion. But war, 
as the general storm in the moral world, and the tongue 
and heart-confusing Babel of the physical world, had in 
every age repeated injustices, which only appeared new 
because each had heard from the preceding age nothing 
save the number of the vanquished armies and towns ; 
but exper'>nced in itself the sufferings. On the contrary, 



SPIRIT OF THE AGE. 51 

our age has, before every other, besides a certain human- 
ity of war, in respect to life, also a growing insiglit into 
its unhiwfulncss. 

Among nations the head has at all times preceded the 
lieart by centuries, as in the slave-trade ; yes, by tliou- 
sands of years, as will perhaps be the case in war. 



Since modes of life beget modes of thought, and opin- 
ions actions, and head and heart, spiritually as well as 
physically, mutually improve or injure each other, so has 
fate, when both are to be healed at once, only one cure, 
and that a long one; the harsh viper-like cure of affliction. 
If sorrow purifies men, why not nations ? Certainly, and 
it is for this reason that men perceive it less, if wounds 
and fast-days improve the one, battle-fields and centuries 
of penance do the other, and generations must sink sadly 
and sorrowfully to destruction. Not by a splendid martial 
funeral with firing of cannon, but by a battle of the ele- 
ments, is the sky made blue and the earth fruitful. At 
the same time in histoiy, as in the almanac, the thick, dull 
St. Thomas's day is shorter than the bright, warm St. 
John's day, although both conduct into new seasons of 
the year. 

But until, and in order that, our children and children's 
children may pass through the winter centuries, this it is 
that nearly affects us and education. We must meet the 
great entanglement by partial unravellings. The child 
must be armed against the future; yes, even against the 
close-pressing present, with a counterbalancing weight of 
three powers against the three weaknesses of the will, of 
love, and of religion. Our age has only a passionate 
power of desire, like animals, the mad, the sick, and 



52 LEVANA. 

every weakling ; but not that energy of will which was 
most nobly displayed in Sparta and Rome, — in the Stoa, 
and in the early Church. And now the arts, as the state 
formerly did, must harden the young spirit, and subdue 
the will. The uniform color of a stoic oneness must 
extinguish the common praise of the various tiger-spots 
and serpent brilliancy of passionate agitation ; the girl and 
the boy must learn that there is something in the ocean 
higher than its waves ; namely, a Christ who calls upon 
them. 

When the stoic energy of will is formed, there is then a 
loving spii'it made free. Fear is more egoistic than cour- 
age, because it is more needy ; the exhausting parasitical 
plants of selfishness only attach themselves to decayed 
trunks. But power kills what is feeble, as strong decoc- 
tion of quassia kills flies. If man, created more for love 
than for opposition, can only attain a free, clear space, he 
possesses love ; and that is love of the strongest kind, 
which builds on rocks, not on waves. Let the bodily 
heart be the pattern of the spiritual ; easily injured, sen- 
sitive, lively, and warm, but yet a tough, free-beating 
muscle, behind the lattice-work of bones, and its tender 
nerves are difficult to find. 

As there is no contest about the nature of power and 
love, but only of the ways to attain them (these, however, 
penetrate deep into the matter) ; but, as about religion, 
on the contrary, the doubts of many must first be solved 
as to whether there be only one, and whether different 
paths lead to it, so the third point in which the child is to 
be educated against the age, must endeavor to estnbli>h 
first, instead of the means, the right to educate religiously 
Power and love are two op ^^osing forces of the inner man 
but religion is the equal union of both, the man within the 
man. 



R 



RELIGIOUS EDUCATION. 5^ 

CHAPTER IV. 

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION. 
§36. 

ELIGION is now no longer a national, but a house- 
hold goddess. Our little age is a magnifjing-glass, 
through which, as is well known, the exalted appears flat 
and level. Since we now send all our children out into a 
townlike futurity, in which the broken church-bells only 
dully call the populous market-place to the silent church, 
we must, more anxiously than ever, seek to give them a 
house of prayer in the heart, and folded hands, and humil- 
ity before the invisible world, if we beheve in a religion 
and distinguish it from morality. 

The history of nations determines that there is this 
separation. There have been many rehgions, but there 
is only one code of morals ; in those a god has always 
become a man, and therefore been concealed under many 
folds ; in this a man has become God, and been clearly 
manifested. The middle ages had, along with moral 
churchyards full of dead bodies and rank vegetation, full 
of cruelty and lust, also churches and spires for the relig- 
ious sentiment. In our times, on the contrary, the sacred 
groves of religion are cleared and trodden down, and the 
public roads of morality made straighter and more sure. 
Ah ! a contemporaneous decline of religion and morality 
would be too sad ! The age will conceal the departure 
of the sense for the heavenly by the greater sharpness 
and severity of that for the moral ; and at least by small, 
delicate, and therefore more numerous, sides acquire a 
moral breadth. As men in towns, where they canno* 



54 LEVANA. 

build in width build in height, so we, reversing the mat- 
ter, build in width instead of in height ; more over the 
earth than into the skj. "We may truly say that France, 
in general, with its chemical, physical, mathematical, and 
warlike noonday lights, can hardly behold in the starry 
heaven of religion more than a last shadowy quarter of 
the moon, resembling rather a cloud than a star ; whilst 
in England and Germany religion is still at least seen as 
a distant milky-way, and on paper as a star-chart ; but 
one could not, without injustice, describe the religious dif- 
ference of these countries as a moral one. And was and 
is stoicism, this noble son of morahty, as love is its daugh- 
ter, in and by itself religion ? If the difference between 
religion and morality were not founded on something true, 
it w^ere incomprehensible how so many fanatical sects of 
the early and later centuries — for instance, the Quietists 
— could have arrived at the illusive belief that in the 
inmost enthusiastic love of God enduring sinfulness con- 
sumes itself, so that none remains as it does in the worldly 
man. It is true, that religiousness, in its highest degree, 
is identical with morality, and this wdth that ; but that 
equally pertains to the highest degree of every power ; 
and every sun wanders only through the heavenly ether. 
All that is divine must as certainly meet and unite with 
morality, as science and art, so that in every soul rescued 
from sin there must as certainly be religious Tabors as 
there are hills in the crater of ^tna. 

It must be understood that we do not here speak of 
that beggar religion which only prays and sings before 
the gates of heaven, until the Peter's pence are bestowed 
upon it. 

§37. 

"What, then, is religion? Prayerfully pronounce the 



RELIGIOUS EDUCATION. 55 

answer. The belief in God ; for it is not only a sense 
for the holy, and a belief in the invisible, but a presenti- 
ment of it, without which no kingdom of the incompre- 
hensible were conceivable. Efface God from the heart, 
and everything which lies above or below the earth is 
only a recurring enlargement of it ; that which is above 
the earth would become only a higher grade of mechan- 
ism, and consequently, earthly. 

If the question is put, What do you mean by the word 
God? I will let an old German, Sebastian Frank, answer: 
" God is an unutterable sigh lying in the depths of the 
soul." A beautiful, profound saying ! But as the unut- 
terable dwells in every soul, it must be manifested to 
every stranger by words. Let me give to the God-fear- 
ing spirit of every age, the woi"ds of our times, and listen 
to what it says of religion. 

" Religion is, in the beginning, the learning of God ; — 
hence the great name divine, one learned about God, — 
truly religion is the blessedness arising from a knowledge 
of God. Without God we are lonely throughout eternity; 
but if we have God we are more warmly, more intimately, 
more steadfastly united than by friendship and love. I 
am then no longer alone with my spirit. Its great first 
friend, the Everlasting, whom it recognizes, the inborn 
friend of its innermost soul, will abandon it as little as it 
can do itself, and in the midst of the impure or empty 
whirl of trifles and of sins, on the market-place, and the 
battle-field, I stand with closed breast in which the Al- 
mighty and All-holy speaks to me, and reposes before me 
like a near sun, behind which the outer world lies in 
darkness. I have entered into his church, the temple of 
the universe, and remain therein blessed, devout, pious, 
' .-en if the temple should become dark, or cold, or under- 



56 Li:VANA. 

mined by p^ravcs. What I do, or suffer, is as little a 
sacrifice to him as I can offer one to myself; I love him 
whether I suffer or not. The flame from heaven falls on 
the altar of sacrifice, and consumes the beast, but the 
flame and the priest remain. If my great friend demand 
something from me, the heaven and the earth seem glori- 
ous to me, and I am happy as he is ; if he deny me any- 
thing, it is a storm on the ocean, but it is spanned by 
rainbows, and I recognize above it the kindly sun which 
has no tempestuous sides, but only sunshiny ones. A 
code of morality only rules bad, unloving souls, in order 
that they may first become better and afterwards good. 
But the loving contemplation of the soul's first friend, 
who abundantly animates those laws, banishes not merely 
the bad thoughts which conquer, but those al<o which 
tempt. As the eagle flies high above the highest moun- 
tains, so does true love above struggling duty. 

" "Where religion is, there both men, and beasts, and 
the whole world are loved. Every being is a moving 
temple of the Infinite. Everything earthly purifies and 
suns itself in the thought of him ; only one earthly thing 
remains darkly existent, sin, the true annihilation of the 
soul ; or the unceasing Tantalus, Satan. 

" One may with some right speak to otl ers about that 
of which one never speaks to one's self: for within me he 
is so near me, that I can with difficulty separate his word 
and mine ; for from the second self my own is reflected, 
and I only find him who illumines myself as well as the 
dew-drop. 

" But if it be no error to beheve all this, how wilt thou, 
O God! appear to those who have overcome the agitations 
of life in the one still hour of death ; then when world 
after world, human being after human being, has disap* 



RELIGIOUS EDUCATION. 57 

poared, and nothing but the Eternal remains with the 
mortal immortal? He who brings God Avith him into 
the last darkest night cannot know what it is to die ; for 
he beholds tiie eternal star in the boundless distance." 

If you do not believe that religion is the poetry of 
morality, the lofty, nay, the loftiest, style of life, think les3 
of the mystic enthusiasts, who, as despisers of the doctrine 
of happiness, were willing to be damned, if but the love 
of God remained within them, than of Fenelon : could 
you be purer, more steadfast, richer, more self-sacrificing, 
or more blessed than he, at once child, woman, man, and 
angel ? 

§38. 

How, then, is the child to be led into the new world 
of religion? Not by arguments. Every step of finite 
knowledge can be reached by learning and perseverance ; 
but the Infinite, which supports the end of those steps, 
can only be seen at a glance, not reached by counting ; we 
arrive there by wings, not by steps. To prove, as to doubt, 
the existence of God, is to prove or to doubt the existence 
of existence. The soul seeks its original, — not merely 
an onginal world near the present one, — that freedom 
from which finite existence received its laws ; but it could 
not seek if it did not know and did not possess. The 
greatness of religion is not confined to one opinion, it ex- 
tends over the whole man ; as greatness, of whatever 
kind, reierables the rock-bound mountains, one of which 
is never found alone in a level plain, but rises up among 
neigh].)oring heights, and extends into a mountain range. 

As there is no corporeal world without a spiritual soul 
(or no resurrection-ashes without a phoenix), so there is 
no soul or spiritual world without God ; just as in the 
same way there is no fate without a Providence. 
3* 



58 lEVANA. 

The purest distinction of man from the lower animala 
is neither reflection noi morality ; for sparks at least of 
these stars shine in the ranks of the brute creation ; but 
religion, which is neither merely opinion nor disposition, 
but the heart of the inner man, and therefore the ground- 
work of the rest. In the middle ages, so dark for other 
knowledge, religion, like the sky at night, hung nearer to 
the earth, and extended brightly over it; whereas, to 
us, God, like the sun in the daytime, seems only like 
the keystone of the arch of heaven. The old chronicler 
introduces bloody rain, — monsters, — fights of birds, — 
children's games, — flights of locusts, — yes, even sudden 
deaths, — among the great events of the world, as impor- 
tant signs, as the smoke-clouds of an impending war; 
and war, a still more important sign, had, as a judgment 
upon sin, its heavenly as well as its earthly origin. At 
the same time this parallelism, or rather predetermined 
harmony between earth and heaven, was at least more 
consistent than the new physical influence which allows 
not the day-watch of one man, but the thousand-yeared 
watch of the history of the world to be fixed by a God, 
resembling a theatrical one, only that he is not a mock 
sun, but a real sun ; as if the difference between the 
earthly and the heavenly rested only on degrees of great- 
ness ; and as if the admission or exclusion of the Infinite 
did not equally apply to the whole of the finite universe, 
and to its smallest part. 

He who possesses religion finds a providence not more 
truly in the history of the world than in his own family 
history : the rainbow, which hangs a glittering circle in 
the heights of heaven, is also formed by the same sun in 
the dew-drop of a lowly flower. The diffident modesty 
of present individuals who prefer leaving the care of 



RELIGIOUS EDUCATION. 5g 

themselves to blind flite, rather than to watchful prov- 
idence, testifies less to unbelief and self-depreciation, 
than to the consciousness of not believing and acting 
piously. 

Herder proves that all nations have received writing 
and their earliest forms of civilization from the teachings 
of religion ; but does he not thereby prove something 
further ? — namely, this : that in nations, and conse- 
quently in men, the ideal is older than the real ? — that 
so the child is nearer the highest than the lowest, for that 
lies in him ; and that we reckon time by the stars and 
the sun earlier than by the town-clock ; and that the 
Godhead, as once in paradise, so now in the desert, im- 
presses his image on man before he can discolor it, and 
so afterwards he can never lose or be without it ? Every- 
thing holy is before what is unholy ; guilt presupposes 
innocence, not the reverse ; angels, but not fallen ones, 
were created. Hence man does not properly rise to the 
highest, but first sinks gradually down from it, and then 
afterwards rises again : a child can never be considered 
too innocent and good. It is thus that the Infinite Being 
appears to nations and individuals earlier than the finite, 
3'ea, than infinite space ; as the almighty power of young 
nature produced, according to Schelling, the fixed suns 
earlier than the worlds which roll round them. If a 
whole system of religious metaphysics did not dreamingly 
sleep within the child, how could the mental contempla- 
tion of infinity, God, eternity, holiness, &c., be imparted 
to him, since we cannot communicate it by outward 
means, and indeed liave nothing for that purpose but 
words, which have not the power of creating, but only of 
arousing? The dying and the fainting hear inward 
music which no outward object gives ; and ideas are 



6o LEVANA. 

such inward tones.* In general even the questions, that 
is, the objects of proper metaphysics, are among children, 
as among the uneducated classes, much more active and 
common than one supposes, only under different names ; 
and the four-year-old child will ask what lies behind the 
curtains of the hidden world, whence is the origin of 
God, &c. For instance, in children talking together, 
the author heard his fi\'e-year-old boy philosophize and 
say, " God has made everything, so if one offers him 
anything he has made it " ; whereupon his four-year-old 
sister said, " He makes nothing " ; and he answered, " He 
makes nothing, because he has made it." Again ; the 
seven-year-old sister maintained, if the soul in the head 
had another set of arms, legs, and a head, another soul 
must dwell in that, and this again would hiive a head, 
and so on forever.f 

If Rousseau gives up God, and consequently religion, 
as the late inheritance of a matured age, he can, except 
in the case of great soub, expect no more religious inspi- 
ration and love than a Parisian father, who, after the 
fashion of some nations, never sees his son till he no 
longer needs a father, can expect filial affection. | When, 
indeed, could the most holy take deeper root than in the 
most holy age of innocence, or that which shall have 
eternal influence, than in the age which never forgets ? 

* So the fear of ghosts, this unceasing dread, which without any 
outward cause — by that only corporeal fear is produced — obtains 
the mastery, and makes men stiff and cold. 

t While writing this, the above-mentioned four, now six-year-old 
child said, number has a one and begins, and what begins must also 
end. At last she showed me a stick, and asked, whether it did not 
end on all sides. 

J At least, Mercier says, that the foshionable Tarisians, even the 
women, do not see their children, who are brought up in the country, 
until they are fully grown. 



RELIGIOUS EDUCATION. 6l 

Not the clouds of the fore or afternoon, but the overcast 
or bkie sky of the morning, decides upon the fairness of 
the day. 

But as the first rule to be observed by any one who 
will give something is, that he must himself have it ; so 
it is true, that no one can teach religion who has it not : 
mature hypocrisy, or lip-religion, can beget nothing but 
immature ; such a mock sun can neither warm nor give 
light, and an acoustic deception returns every optic one. 
He who has no God in heaven, and in his own heart, can 
without immorality believe himself bound by no morality 
(though perhaps for the sake of utility) to implant in his 
children a nothing, which he has already torn from him- 
self, and which he afterwards intends to eradicate from 
them. But, properly^ neither belief in the morahty of a 
religious lie, nor in its political advantages, sows deceit in 
the trusting open heart of childhood ; that is only done 
by the selfish weakness which willingly makes terms at 
once with God and the Devil : that arffumentum a tuto (a 
keeping open of a back-door into heaven, worthy, but 
for its wounding of reason and morality, of a very oppo- 
site name) does not rank, thank God 1 among the sins of 
our age. 

The younger a child is, the less let him hear the 
Unspeakable named, who only by a word becomes to 
him the speakable : but let him behold his symbols. 
Tiie sublime is the temple-step of religion, as the stars 
are of immeasurable space. When what is mighty 
appears in nature, — a storm, thunder, the starry firma- 
ment, death, — then utter the word God before the 
child. A great misfortune, a great blessing, a great 
crime, a noble action, are building-sites for a child's 
church. 



6z LEVANA. 

Show everywhere to the child, as well as on the bor 
ders of the holy land of religion, devotional and holy 
sentiments ; these pass over, and at last unveil for him 
the object ; just as if you are alarmed he is so too, with- 
out know^ing why. Newton, who uncovered his head 
when the greatest name was uttered, would have been 
without saying a word, a teacher of religion to children. 
Not with them, but only before them, should you pray 
your own prayers, that is, think aloud of God ; but their 
own you should pray with them. A stated exaltation and 
emotion is a desecrated one. The prayers of children 
are empty and cold, and are in fact only remains of the 
Jewish-Christian belief in sacrifices, which will reconcile 
and win the favor of God by means of innocent beings, 
not of innocence ; and the child secretly regards the God, 
whom you give him by word of mouth, as the Kamt- 
schatkadale and every savage does his. A grace before 
meat must make every child deceitful. As he grows 
older, let a day of prayer, or of any religious observances 
become more rare, but on that account more solemn ; 
what the first affecting Lord's Supper is to the child, that 
let every hour be in which you consecrate his heart to 
religion. Let children go to church but rarely, for you 
might as well take them to hear an oratorio of Klopstock 
or of Handel, as that of the church ; but when you do 
take them, impress on them the value of a syn pathy with 
the devotional sentiments of their parents. Lideed, I 
would rather — since as yet there is no special public 
worship of God, and no special preachers for children — 
you should lead them on the great days of the seasons, or 
of human life, merely into the empty temple, and show 
them the holy place of their elders. If you add to that 
twilight, night, the organ, singing, a father's preaching. 



RELIGIOUS EDUCATION. 63 

you will at least leave behind on the young heart more 
religions consecration by that one church-going, than you 
could on an old one by a whole year of church-attending. 
After these considerations it makes one's heart ache to 
think of that already nearly abandoned custom, which 
some, however, kindly wish back, I mean that of setting 
the children and young people to take down the sermon, 
at least an outline of it, in church, and afterwards to 
write it out fully at home or at school. Although this 
nearly borders on jest, we will ask in earnest, whether 
this must not convert the religious sincerity of fellow- 
feeling into a mere anatomy and skeleton, and draw down 
the holy, and the aim of the heart, into a means of exer- 
cising the understanding, and hold every emotion at a 
distance, because feeling might hinder writing ? It were, 
perhaps, something about as good, if a young woman 
made a short pragmatic abstract of her lover's declaration 
of love ; or a soldier, of the fiery speech of his leader 
before battle ; or an evangelist, a neat exposition of 
Christ's Sermon on the Mount, with all its subdivisions. 
When teachers thus convert all the highest ends into new 
means and ways, that is to say backways, do they not 
spiritually use spiritual things, as the modern Romans 
really do triumphal arches and temples of Jupiter, which 
they degrade into wash-houses ? 

For the poor children of the people, whose parents are 
still pupils of the Sunday, and for whom, as a set-off to 
the deep desert of the week, a raising hand must not fail 
to lift them out of their low cloudy heaven, is a public 
church service more necessary than for the children of 
the upper classes. The church walls, the pulpit, the or- 
gan, are to them symbols of the Divine ; and as a symbol 
it is indifferent whether it be the village church or the 



64 LEVANA. 

temple of nature. And do we ourselves know where, or 
if ever, the Unsearchable can terminate the a.'scending 
scale of his symbols ? Does not the higher spirit require 
again a higher symbol? 

Let the eye of the pupil, even where he only sees outer 
walls and forms, yet everywhere gaze into the Holy of 
Holies of religion, which the church-goer must bring with 
him into the Church as the temple-court of the heart. Let 
every foreign exercise of religion, and every outward 
preparation for it, be as holy to him as his own. Let the 
Protestant child hold the Catholic saints' images by the 
roadside to be as worthy of reverence as the ancient 
oak-forests of his forefathers ; let him receive different 
religions as lovingly as different languages, in which but 
one spirit of humanity is expressed. Every genius is 
all-powerful in his own language, every heart in its own 
religion. 

But let not fear create the God of childhood ; fear was 
itself created by a wicked spirit ; shall the Devil become 
the grandfather of God ? 

He who seeks something higher in its own nature, not 
merely in degree, than what life can give or take away, 
that man has religion, though he only believes in infinity, 
not in the Infinite, only in eternity, without an Eternal ; 
as if, in opposition to other artists, he did not paint the sun 
\\\[\\ a human countenance, but rounded off this to resem- 
ble the former. For he who regards all life as holy and 
wonderful, whether it dwell in animals, or, still lower, in 
plants, — he who, like Spinoza, by means of his noble soul, 
floats, and rests less upon steps and heights than upon 
wings, whence the surrounding universe — the stationary, 
and that moving by law — changes into one immense 
light, life, and being, and surrounds him, so that he feels 



RELIGIOUS EDUCATION. 65 

ab:?orbed in the great light, and wishes to be nothing 
but a raj in the immeasurable splendor, — such a man 
has, and consequently imparts, religion ; since the highest 
ever reflects and paints the highest, even though formless, 
behind the eye. 

True unbelief relates to no individual propositions, or 
counter-propositions, but to blindness towards the whole. 
Excite in the child the all-powerful perception of the 
whole, in opposition to the selfish perception of the parts, 
and then you raise the man above the world, the eternal 
above the transitory. Place in the child's hand our 
religious book ; but do not give the explanation after, but 
before the reading, so that the strange form may enter the 
young soul as something entire. Why should misunder- 
standing be the precursor of understanding ? Without 
wonder there is no faith ; and the belief in the marvellous 
is itself an inward faith. You must impart a sunbeam of 
its origin to everything great which comes before you, — 
to genius, to love, to every power ; only things weak and 
curved consist of steps, stairs, and torture-ladders ; the 
true ladder of heaven has no steps. At least two miracles 
or revelations remain for you uncontested in this age, 
which deadens sound with unreverberating materials ; 
they resemble an Old and a New Testament, and are 
these, — the birth of finite being, and the birth of life 
within the hard wood of matter. For in one inexplicable 
thing every other is involved, and one miracle annihilates 
the whole philosophy. Consequently, you do not act the 
part of a hypocrite when you permit the child to draw 
anything out of the book of religion, or the secret book c f 
nature, which you cannot explain. Living religion grows 
not by the doctrines, but by the narratives, of the Bible : 
the best Christian religious doctrine is the life of Christ ; 



66 LEVANA. 

and after that, the sufrerin2;s and deaths of his followers, 
even those not related in Holy Writ. 

In the fair spring-time of the religious admission of the 
child among his elders, — an important one, since then 
first he comes publicly before the altar, and acts with all 
tlie rights of an independent being, — in this never-recur- 
ring time, when the dawn of life suddenly breaks into 
the morning red, and thei"eby announces the newness of 
love and of nature, — there is no better priest to lead and 
accompany the young soul, with dancing and great joy, to 
the high altar of religion, than the poet, who annihilates a 
mortal world to build on it an immortal ; so that our life 
on earth may resemble those polar lands, which, so void 
of animals and flowers, so cold and colorless, yet, after 
sunless days, display rich nights, in which heaven pours 
down its gifts upon the earth, and Avhere the northern or 
polar lights fill the whole blue with fire colors, jewels, 
thunder, splendid tropical storms, and remind the inhab- 
itants of the cold earth of that which lives above them. 



THIRD FRAGMENT. 

Chap. I. Digression upon the beginning of Man and of Education, 
§§ 39 - 42. — Chap. II. Joyousness of Children, §§ 43 - 45. — Chap. 
III. Their Games, §§ 46 - 54. — Chap. IV. Their Dances, ^§ 55 - 
57. — Chap. V. Music, §§ 58 - 60. — Chap. VI. Commanding, For- 
bidding, §§ 61-63. — Chap. VII. Punishments, §§ 64, 65. — Chap. 
VIII. Passionate Crying of Children, §§ 66-70. — Chap. IX. On 
the Trustfulness of Children, §§ 71, 72. 

CHAPTER I. 

THE BEGINNING OF EDUCATION. 




§39. 

HEN does education begin its work ? With the 
first breath of the child. The Lght of the soul, 
which we call life, issuing from I know not 
what sunny cloud, strikes upon the bodily 
world, and moulds the rough mass into its dwelling-place, 
which glows on until death, by the nearness of another 
world, allures it still further on. In this first moment — 
for, if time be elsewhere, yet his pulse then beats the first 
second — is the invisible beam of individual existence 
broken into the colored spectrum of his bodily appearance . 
the dispositions, the sex, yes, even the resemblance to the 
father's and mother's countenances, are distinguished by 
yet unseen lines. For this distinct organization of a state 
within the social state cannot form itself by degrees like 



68 LEVANA. 

the individual parts Avhich it governs ; thus, the forming 
influence, which moulds the transparent child's face like 
its father's or its grandfather's, cannot lie in the imagina- 
tion of the mother, but must exist in the child itself. 

The two life-chains of the parents are somewhat differ- 
ent, especially the last link, from which the spark of the 
new man issued in order to animate the physical clod of 
earth into an Adam. When one considers how little has 
yet been done for the races of the coming world (except 
in the cases of horses, sheep, and canary-birds), not even 
observations, to say nothing of institutions, merely for a 
cradle rather than for the child in the cradle ; — how the 
connections of the sexes, of years, of months, of hours, are 
so lawlessly and carelessly forgotten and injured, when 
the foundation-stones of centuries are laid ; — how here 
the giddy, sensual man requires more laws than the un- 
changing beast which moves straight on in the leading- 
strings of instinct and of health, — and how the world be- 
comes continually more clamorous in desire, more indif- 
ferent to wisdom ; one must, from a carelessness for 
moral requisitions, which contents itself only with the 
bare fulfilment of the ten commandments for ruffians, 
finally come to the conclusion, that men seek to settle 
with morality as with a creditor. And may not a state, 
Tike an elder, prescribe for all, with its cold, ever-during 
hand, laws which a loving individual would never have 
thought of making, and yet is obliged to obey ; just as the 
law-book, not a pair of lovers, contemplates divorce ? 

For the rest, we may well venture to complain that 
Nature, during the " twelve holy nights " in which, as 
creatress, she wanders alone with her youngest creatures, 
makes it too difficult even for the conscientious not to 
steal and murder in the dark. At every step down the 



THE BEGINNING OF EDUCATION. 69 

deep, gloomy ladder of futurity up which men and ages 
ascend, conscience calls, " Here is a man, there perhaps a 
genius, the heaven of his people"; but we, like night- 
wanderers, must spare the known, and injure the un- 
known. 

Since parents play so prominent a part in the history 
of the creation of the child's body, one can with difficulty 
refrain from the question, how much they contribute to 
the theogony (divine generation) of the child's spirit ? If 
we must think of a dark problem, it is also permitted, nay 
necessary, for us to think of some solution. The mental 
dissimilarity of dispositions is a mere product of bodily 
differences, since both mutually presuppose each other. 
It is, indeed, easier for us to apprehend difference in 
bodies than in minds ; but, properly, there is only an 
apparent difference of quantity visible in those, and only 
a real one of quality in these ; so it is only minds which 
grow or inure themselves to anything. If it will not be 
admitted that that spark of distinguishing individuality 
flies down from the stars in clouds during conception, it 
must then either, precisely in the moment of inducting its 
human covering, cast off a previous covering spun from 
the father's or the mother's life, or it was, like thought and 
motion, born of soul. Creation of spirits is not more diffi- 
cult to comprehend than creation of thoughts by spirits, or 
than any other change. In both cases, especially in the 
second, not only does the bodily life of the parents cradle 
the bodies of the future, but also their spiritual life its 
spirits. But, then, with what trembling should this bal- 
ance be held ! If thou knewest that every black thought 
of thine, or every glorious, independent one, separated 
itself from thy soul, and took root without thee, and for 
half a century pushed and bore its poisonous flowers or 



70 lEVANA. 

healing roots, O how piously wouldest thou choose and 

think ! — And dost thou, then, so certainly know the 

reverse ? 

§40. 

I come back to my own opinion, that spii'itual education 
begins at birth; for up to that period the mother — as 
often afterwards in a worse sense — has only a blood rela- 
tionship, not a nerve relationship, with the child sleeping 
at the gates of the world. So that all that is false which 
has been said about an electric charging chain to which 
the little invisible is attached, and by which he is charged 
with the streams and sparks of the maternal passions and 
feelings. Since, according to the best anatomists, the 
mother does not nourish the child with her blood directly, 
but through media, the maternal passions which are to 
affect it through the blood can only work in two v/ays, 
either by mechanical change, slow or quick, or by chemi- 
cal change, oxidized or unoxidized. The embryo soul 
does not partake of the mechanical change ; because the 
mother's blood can move as fast in the ball-room of love 
as in the servants'-hall of anger ; or creep as slowly when 
sitting full of hope before the embroidery-frame, as of 
despair before a bier. The chemical change of the blood 
by passion, or other external excitement, is itself, in the 
first instance, a product of the mind and of the nerves 
which serve it either mediately or immediately. The 
intoxication of the nerves gives the full beat of the pulse, 
but not so the reverse; else the excitement of a race would 
have as complete an effect as a drink has upon thirst. 
How the oxidized or unoxidized blood of the mother can 
more affect the child's mind than her own, must arise 
from the influence of the blood as nourishment ; and as 
the blood, before it is capable of affording nourishment, 



THE BEGINNING OF EDUCATION. 71 

must be assimilated by the little foreign body, it can pos- 
sess no influence different to that of every other nourish- 
ment: and, in nourishing, as little propagates its differences 
as does the blood of sheep or of lions. The objections 
made by nurses go far in justification of this. 

The clearest proof that mothers have no influence on 
the mental development of the embryotic human being is 
given in the varied characters of the children in the same 
family ; and even more especially in the cases of twins, 
where the prenatal conditions must have been precisely 
the same. Neither tell me, that the beautiful Madonna 
faces seen in Catholic countries are to be regarded as 
copies of those painted in the churches ; for I reply, that 
the paintings presuppose lovely countenances, and not 
these the paintings. 

At the same time, the disbelief that the mother decides 
on the mental and physical form of her child leaves room 
for the true belief that her health or sickness is repeated 
in the little second being : and it is for this very reason 
that superstitious fancies about marks, misbirths, and 
similar things ought to be so much guarded against ; not 
because what is dreaded brings its fulfilment, but because 
it, along with those evils which are produced by alarm 
before a thing occurs, and undue anxiety after it has hap- 
pened, weakens the body, and brings for the sufferer years 
of trouble. 

§41. 

At last the child can say to the father. Educate, for I 
breathe. The first breath, like the last, closes an old with 
a new world. The new is, in this case, the world of light 
and colors ; the life on earth, like a painter, begins with 
the eye. The ear, indeed, preceded it, — so that it is the 
first sense of the living as it is the last of the dying, — but 



72 LEVANA. 

tlien it belonged to the realm of feeling ; and it is on this 
account that birds in the Qg^, and soft, many-punctured 
silk-worms, die from a loud report. The first sound falls 
with a darker cIkios on the closely covered soul than the 
first beam of light. So the morning of life opens on the 
freed prisoner with the two senses imparting knowledge 
of distance, like the morning of the day with light and 
gong or bustle. At the same time, light continues to be 
the first enamel of the earth, the first fair word of life. 
The cry which breaks upon the slumbering ear may be 
strong, but it arouses none but the mother, except the 
child; and so the world of sound begins with a discord, 
but the world of sight with beauty and glory. 

Every first thing continues forever with the child : the 
first color, the first music, the first flower, paint the fore- 
ground of his life ; yet we can prescribe no other law than 
this, protect the child from all that is impetuous and vio- 
lent, and even from sweet impressions. Nature, so soft, 
defenceless, and excitable, may be distorted by one error, 
and hardened into a growing deformity. For this reason 
the crying of children, if composed of a union of discord, 
hastiness, imperiousness, and passion, ought to be guarded 
against by all due means, but not by effeminacy, which 
only increases it. 

§42. 

If in the ocean of a human soul, sections may be made, 
and degrees of longitude and latitude ascribed to it, we 
must, in the case of a child, make the first section of the 
first three years, during which, from the want of the power 
of speech, he still lives in the animal cloister, and only 
approaches us through the speech-grating of natural signs. 
In this speechless period, of which we shall now treat, tha 



THE BEGINNING OF EDUCATION. 73 

pupils are quite given up to feminine fluency ; but how 
^vomen ought now to educate can only be seen later on, 
when we inquire how they themselves ought to have been 
educated. In this period of twilight, in this first moon's 
quarter, or eighth of life, let the light only grow of itself, 
do not kindle it. Here the sexes are unseparated, neither 
divided by the Platonic Aristophanes, nor by the tailor. 
The whole human being is as yet a closed bud, whose 
blossom is concealed. Like the eggs of birds, whether of 
song or of prey, and like the new-born young of the do\ e 
or of the vulture, all at first require warmth, not nourish- 
ment, which might have a very different effect. 

And what, then, is warmth for the human chicken ? — 
Happiness. One has but to give them play-room, by 
taking away what may be painful, and their powers shoot 
up of themselves. The new world which the suckling 
brings with him, and the new one which he finds around 
him, enfold him as learning, or develop themselves as 
knowledge ; and neither worlds yet require the ploughing 
or sowing of stranger hands. Even the artificial gymnas- 
tics of the senses, which will teach a year-old child to see 
and hear and hold, are not much more necessary than the 
leading-strings which show him how to walk; and can the 
advantage of teaching some use of the senses, say in three 
months, which would have come of itself in four, be a rec- 
ompense for neglecting and wearying one's self in the first 
year and with the first child, to the injury of after years 
and the next children, about something which uncon- 
strained life necessitates in savages and country people ? 

The excellent Schwarz, in his Treatise on Education, 

prompts, by his proposition of an early gymnasium for all 

the senses, to an appendix to this paragraph. As to the 

material advantage of these school classes for the five 

4 



74 I^ I^ V A X A . 

sense?, it is certain that rich, varied life, by its unceasing 
influence, educates and practises the senses with a power 
which does not require the poverty of particular institu- 
tions for practice, except you wish to convert the whole 
child into one single sense, — into a painter's eye or a 
musician's ear. 

On the other hand, these practices have a formal utility 
in constraining the mind to perceive the finer subdivisions 
of its sensations, and to measure the world more accu- 
rately by lines than by yards. In the mean time, the 
inner world offers itself to a finer and higher school than 
the outward. Especially leave out all exercises of the 
sense of taste, for whose hunt gout the kitchen is the best 
school ; since we do not need by its means to distinguish 
between nourishment and poison, but rather teach by its 
exercise at rich tables to confound the two, so that we, 
unlike the beasts, who only when young, from unpractised 
taste, crop injurious weeds, when old, from refined taste, 
long for poison dishes and poison goblets. 

Let there be here not so much a c?4-gression as a pre- 
gression concerning the order of development of the 
senses. Schwarz, in his Treatise on Education, assigns 
too late a birthtime, almost beyond the age of childhood, 
for the senses of taste and smell. lie seems, however, to 
confound the refinement of these senses, which no doubt 
takes place in mature age, with their existence and power, 
which certainly flourish in their greatest strength during 
childhood. Every one may remember how, as a child, 
like the animals (which remain stationary on this first 
step), and like savages, he imbibed everything tasty, 
fruits, sugar, sweet wine, fat, with a delight and enjoy- 
ment which weakened with every year of the subsequent 
refinement of the sense; hence the so much lamented 



THE BEGINNING OF EDUCATION. 75 

love of sweetmeats in all children ; hence the experience 
of so many grown-up people, who have had the favorite 
dishes of their childhood cooked for them, that they did 
not like them. Infants no doubt take bitter medicines 
without resistance ; but this is no reproach to their taste ; 
we ourselves in later life seek a pure bitter as a higher 
excitement, in bitter beer, water, and almonds. If a 
young animal eats poisonous plants which an old one 
avoids, there is proved by this less want of taste than su- 
perabundance of appetite, that is, hunger; which in it 
as easily conquers instinct as in us it unfortunately over- 
comes reason. 

Smell, the dulness of which sense speaks as little in 
favor of mental delicacy as that of the eye or of the ear 
does against it, awakes with consciousness, consequently, 
last in a child. We are less aware of its advent, because 
it subserves few necessities, and because its continuance, 
either, for instance, in spice islands, or in Augean sta- 
ble-like streets, renders the consciousness of it difficult. 
Children have little scent-glands for the persons nearest 
them, for instance, for their parents, and thereby dis- 
tinguish them from individuals more rarely seen. And 
it is precisely smell which dies away the first of all the 
senses; although it, unlike the other senses, is seldom 
worn out by too powerful stimulants. And who is there 
who has not experienced in himself — what I have done 
— that often a nosegay of wild flowers, which was to us, 
as village children, a grove of pleasure, has, in after 
years of manhood, and in the town, given us by its old 
perfume an indescribable transport back into godlike 
childhood ; and how, like a flower-goddess, it has raised 
us into the first embracing Aurora clouds of our first dim 
feelings? But how could such a remembrance so stronglj- 



'J^ LEVANA. 

affect us if our childish sensibiHty to flowers had not 
been so strong and heartfelt ? Ascribe, then, to aftei life 
nothing more than the refinement of a deeply implanted 
feehnjr. 



CHAPTER II. 



THE JOYOUSNESS OF CHILDREN. 

§43. 

SHOULD they have anything else ? I can endure a 
melancholy man, but not a melancholy child; the 
former, in whatever slough he may sink, can yet raise his 
eyes either to the kingdom of reason or of hope ; but the 
little child is entirely absorbed and weighed down by one 
black poison-drop of the present. Think of a child led 
to a scaffold, think of Cupid in a Dutch coffin, or watch 
a butterfly, after its four wings have been torn off, creep- 
ing like a worm, and you will feel what I mean. 

But wherefore? The first cause has been already 
given ; the child, like the beast, only knows purest 
(though shortest) sorrow ; one which has no past and no 
future; one such as the sick man receives from without, 
the dreamer from himself into his asthenic brain ; finally, 
one with the consciousness not of guilt, but of innocence. 
Certainly all the sorrows of children are but shortest 
nights, as their joys are but hottest days; and, indeed, 
both so much so that in the later, often clouded and 
starless, time of life, the matured man only longingly re- 
members his old childhood's pleasures, while he seems 



JOYOUSXESS OF CHILDREN. -]-] 

altogether to have forgotten his childhood's griefs. This 
weak remembrance is strangely contrasted with the op- 
posing one in dreams and fevers in this respect, that in 
the two last it is always the cruel sorrows of childhood 
which return: the dream, this mock sun of childhood, 
and tlie fever, its distorting-glass, both draw forth from 
dark corners the fears of defenceless childhood, which 
press and cut with iron fangs into the prostrate soul. 
The fair scenes of dreams mostly play on an after stage ; 
whereas the frightful ones choose for theirs the cradle and 
the nursery. Moreover, in fever the ice hands of the 
fear of ghosts, the striking ones of teachers and parents, 
and every claw with which fate has pressed the young 
heart, stretch themselves out to catch the wandering man. 
Parents consider, then, that every childhood's Rupert,* 
even though it has lain chained for tens of years, yet 
breaks loose and gains mastery over the man so soon as 
it finds him on a sick-bed. The first fright is the more 
dangerous the sooner it happens ; as the man grows older 
he is less and less easily frightened ; the little cradle or 
bed canopy of the child is more easily quite darkened 
than the starry heaven of the man. 

§44. 

Cheerfulness, or joyousness, is the heaven under which 
everything but poison thrives. But let it not be con- 
founded with enjoyments. Every enjoyment, even the 
refined one of a work of art, gives man a selfish mien, 
and withdraws him from sympathy ; hence it is only a 
condition of necessity, not of virtue. On the contrary, 
cheerfulness, the opposite of vexation and sadness, is at 

* The name given in Germany to the fictitious being employed to 
frighten children into obedience. 



78 LEVAXA. 

once the ground and flower of virtue and its crown. Ani- 
mals can enjoy, but only men can be cheerful. The holy 
father is at the same time called the blessed, and God is 
the All-blessed. A morose God is a contradiction, or the 
Devil. The stoic philosopher must unite scorn of enjoy- 
ment with the preservation of cheerfulness. Tlie Chris- 
tian heaven promises no pleasures, like the Turkish, but 
the clear, pure, infinite ether of heavenly joy, which flows 
from the contemplation of the eternal. The foretaste of 
heaven — Paradise, to which the theologians denied pleas- 
ures, but not cheerfulness — sheltered innocence. The 
cheerful man wins our eye and heart, as the morose man 
drives both away : it is the contrary with pleasures ; we 
turn our back on the luxurious, and open our heart to 
the starving. If pleasure be a self-consuming rocket, 
cheerfulness is a returning light star, an object which, 
unlike pleasure, is not worn away by continuance, but 
receives from it new birth. 

§45. 

Now let us return to the dear children. I do indeed 
think that they ought to inhabit their Paradise like our 
first parents, those true flrst children. But pleasures 
make no Paradise, they only help to laugh it away. 
Play, that is, activity, not pleasures, will keep children 
cheerful. By pleasure I understand every flrst agreeable 
impression, not only of the taste, but also of the ear and 
the eye : a plaything gives in the first i)lace pleasure by 
looking at it, and only afterwards cheerfulness by using it. 
Pleasure is an irritating burning spot, not an all-embi*a- 
cing warmth, on the excitable skin of the child. Fur- 
ther, if refined, perpetual drunkards and epicures multiply 
and extend their pleasures by the past and the future, so 



JOYOUSNESS OF CUILDEEN. 79 

children, from want of both, can only have shortest, but, 
consequently, deepest pleasures. Their point of sight, 
like tiieir eye, is less than ours ; the burning-glass of 
ple^^ure should not strike them at focal distiince, but far 
off and gently. In other words, divide the great pleasure 
into little merry-makings, a gingerbread cake into ginger- 
bread nuts, a Christmas eve into a Church year. In one 
month of nine and twenty days a child might be mentally 
de^troyed, if one could make out of every day a lirst 
Christmas day. Not even a grown-up head could stand 
being crowned every day by a new country ; the first in 
Paris, the second in London, the third in Rome, the 
fourth in Vienna. But httle enjoyments work Uke scent- 
bottles on the young souls, and strengthen them from 
action to action. 

^nevertheless, this nimiScation of pleasures only serves 
for the earliest years : afterwards, in a reversed way, will 
a Midsummer feast, a grape-gathering, a Shrove-tide, for 
which children have long to wait, together with the glean- 
ings of a lively memory, shine all the more brightly in 
the dull interval. 

A woi-d about children's love of sweetmeats, against 
which Schwarz strives, perhaps too eagerly, may be 
dropped here. I never yet knew a child to whom sweet, 
savory things and pastry- did not seem the most inimiiable 
cakes and altar paintings, and this merely because a child, 
half animal, htilf savage, is all taste. Bees have at the 
same time a honey and a wax stomach ; but in men, 
children have the first, grown people the second. If 
Schwarz luis always found love of eating and want of 
modesty united, he can only declare this of the age of 
manhood, but even then the love of eating was only tlie 
con>equence and companion of deeper sensual pleasures, 



8o LEV AN A. 

not their cause. Certainly, the unbridled sensualist will 
alter in his meats, and also in his tastes, as the lover of 
eating does on other grounds ; but, on the other hand, how- 
can the pleasures of taste, which grow weaker as every 
year is further from childhood, end in still lower sensu- 
alities, especially since the generality of souls, in regard 
to love, resemble the Egyptians, among whom the gods 
reigned earlier than mortal men ? The fathers do not 
hop, but the children do ; then leave them their other 
Egyptian flesh-pots before their journeying forth into the 
desert. The author has often made the sugar island of 
the tongue, on which of itself no Paphian wood grows, 
into a kind of palaestra of self-denial : at the same time he 
relates the matter with diffidence, only as a question, not 
an answer. For instance, he gave to the two and three 
year old children candied marchpane (the most whole- 
some thing), with the command only to suck it at a certain 
place, and only for so long a time as he permitted. The 
children learned to value and to keep a promise. He 
also offered sugar or honey prizes for the endurance of 
the most strokes on the hand ; but he did it seldom. 

Most royal children can shorten our inquiries by their 
decision. For, as regards pleasures, they have every- 
thing, from toys and drinking and eating things, to car- 
riage-seats and bed-cushions ; but as far as happiness is 
concerned, they are tormented from their governors up 
through every member of the court, so that the kingly 
crown is very early underlined with a crown of thorns, 
or, to speak differently, the black round of sorrow is made 
broader in proportion to their high rank. For, indeed, 
when we consider how generally a prince, satiated with 
eating and drinking, is educated, so that he cannot make a 
step without tutors and lectures, nor a skip without the 
dancing-master, nor take a breath of fresh air without four 



JOYOUSNESS OF CHILDREN. 8l 

horses, we must almost believe that the ancient heretic 
Basilides is now again right as regards princes, when he 
declared that the early Christians would often have been 
martyrs for future sins, if the after-pains were not added 
to the fore-pains of the future. 

Cheerfulness — this feeling of an entirely free nature 
and life, this self-enjoyment of the inner world, not of aa 
outward minute part of the world — opens the child to 
the penetrating all ; it receives nature, not loveless and 
defenceless, but loving and armed, and lets all the young 
powers rise like morning beams, and play upon the world 
and upon itself; and it imparts, as moroseness takes 
away, strength. The early blossoms of gladness are not 
corn-flowers among the seed, but are themselves little 
young ears of cora. It is a beautiful tradition that the 
Virgin Mary and the poet Tasso never wept as children.* 

But now the question is of the means and starry in- 
fluences which preserve this cheerfulness. If it merely 
resulted from negative and physical conditions, then, at 
least for the most instructive half-year of life, that is, the 
first, all would be obtained by a child who was born in 
spring. Why do not men begin life, as Oriental nations 
do the year, with spring ? A child born at this season, 
might an almanac say without lying, moves slowly on 
from cliarm to charm, from leaves to flowers, from the 
warm til of rooms to that of the sky : the wind is not yet 
his enemy, — instead of storms, melodies breathe in the 
branches, — born to a half-year's festival of the earth, he 
must believe that life remains so, — he sees the rich earth 
only afterwards hidden by its covering, — and the enjoy- 
ment of life which the suckling mother imbibes flov/j 
warm through the little heart. 

* Pertschen's Church History. 
4* P 



82 LEVANA. 

CHAPTER III. 

GAMES OF CHILDKEN. 
§46. 

ri^IIAT ^Yllich produces and maintains cheerfulness is 
i nothing but activity. The usual frames of children, 
unlike ours, are only the expressions of earnest activity, 
clothed in lightest wings : children have also a game (it 
is one to them), I mean that of joking, of unmeaning 
speech, in order to have something to say to themselves, 
and so forth. Now if a German were to write a book 
about the games of children, which would at least be more 
useful than one about games of cards, he would, it seems 
to me, distinctly and correctly divide them only into two 
classes : first, into games or exertions of the receiving, ap- 
prehending, learning faculties ; and, secondly, into games 
of the acting, forming powers. The first class would era- 
brace activity from without working inwardly, like the 
nerves of sense ; the other activity from within working 
outwardly, like the nerves of motion. Consequently, if 
the author went deeply into the first class, which he calls 
the theoretic, — the second, on the other hand, the prac- 
tical, — he would adduce games which are properly only 
a child's experimental physics, optics, mechanics. Chil- 
dren have great pleasure, for instance, in turning or rais- 
ing anything, — putting keys into locks, and, in general, 
one thing into another, — opening and shutting doors, to 
which is added, moreover, the dramatic fancy of seeing 
the I'oom now large now small, and themselves alone one 
moment, in company the next; — watching the employ- 
ment of their parents is to them a game of this kind, as is 
also listeninoj to conversation. 



GAMES OF CHILDREN. 83 

In the vSecond or practical division, the author must put 
all those games in which the child seeks to relieve him- 
self of his mental superabundant activity by dramatic 
fancies, and of his bodily, by movements. The examples 
will come in the next paragraph. 

But I think so very scientitic a man would form a third 
class, already hinted at ; namely, that in which the child 
only plays the game, does not really act and feel it, that 
is, where he takes and gives a comfortable form and 
tone ; for instance, looks out of the window, lies upon the 
grass, listens to the nurse and other children. 

§47. 

Play is, in the first place, the working off at once of 
the overflow of both mental and physical powers : after- 
wards, when the school sceptre has carried off the mental 
source of all fire, even till rain comes, the limbs only throw 
off the fulness of life by running, throwing, carrying. 
Play is the fir>t poetry of the human being. (Eating and 
drinking are his prose, and striving to get the needful 
supplies his first solid bread-study and labor of life.) 
Consequently play forms all the powers, without impart- 
ing an overweening influence to any one.* If a teacher 
would be cruel enough to form a whole man into one 
member, for instance, into a magnified ear, he must dur- 
ing the first years so mix the playing cards, by abstracting 
some, that nothing could ever be obtained but games of 
sound. If he wished to be anything better in the games 

* ]\Iany children's games are imitations, but mental; whereas those 
of monkeys are physical, — that is to say, not from any especial inter- 
est in the thing, but merely because imitation falls in most readily 
with the mental impulses of life. Probably the monkey, like Dr. 
Monro's nervous patient, only imitates strangf movements compul- 
surilv and from weakness. 



84 LEVANA. 

than cruel, he would perhaps endeavor to lead his pupil 
with gentle hand, imitating chance which acts from all 
sides, and develops all. But I dread that grown-up, hairy 
hand and fist which knocks on the tender, fructifying dust 
of childhood's blossoms, and shakes a color off, first here, 
then there, so that the proper many-marked carnation may 
be formed. We often think to rule the external but broad 
empire of chance by means which some inner narrow acci- 
dent has thrown together in ourselves. 

§48. 

We will, however, step further into the play-place of 
the little folks, if not to be lawgivers, yet to be markers 
of their games. During the first months of existence the 
child knows nothing of creative play or efforts, only of the 
passive reception of impressions. During that period of 
the most rapid physical growth, and inpouring of the 
world of sense, the overwhelmed soul does not direct 
itself towards those active games in which afterwards its 
superabundant powers find relief. It can only look, listen, 
catch, touch : so laden, its little hands and arms quite full, 
it can do and attempt little with them. 

It is only at a later period, when, by means of the five 
acts of the five senses, the knowledge of the outer world 
is attained, and one w^ord after another gradually liberates 
the mind, that greater freedom produces active play, and 
that fancy begins to move, whose unfledged wings lan- 
guage first plumes. Only by words does the child obtain 
an inner world opposed to the outer, by which he can set 
the external universe in motion. He has two kinds of 
play, very different both in direction and time, — first, that 
with playthings, and second, that with and amor g play 
mates. 



GAMES OF CHILDREN. "85 

§49. 

In the first place the child plays with things, conse- 
quently with himself. A doll is to him a nation, or a 
company of players, and he is the theatrical poet and 
director. Every bit of wood is a gilded flower-rod, on 
which fancy can bud hundred-leaved roses. For not 
merely to grown-up people, but also to children, the 
phtything itself becomes indifferent if a happy imagina- 
timi alone is permitted to decide ; whether it be with re- 
gi\rd to imperial or laurel crowns, shepherds' crooks, or 
raai^lials" staves, the flails of war or of agriculture. In 
the eyes of wonder-working fancy every Aaron's rod 
blossoms. As the Elysian fields of the ancients near 
Naples were grounded (according to Maecard) on nothing 
more than a bush in a cave, so, for children, is every bush 
a forest ; and they possess that heaven which Luther in 
l)is table-talk promises the saints, where the bugs are 
sweet-scented, the serpents playful, the dogs gold-skinned, 
and Luther a lamb. I mean to say, that in the heaven 
of childhood the father is God the Father, the mother the 
mother of God, the nurse a Titaness, the old servant an 
angel of the communion, the turkey a cherub of Eden, and 
Eden itself is restored. Do you not know that there is a 
time when fancy is more actively creative than even in 
youth, namely, in childhood, in which nations create their 
gods, and only speak in poetry ? 

Never forget that the games of children with inanimate 
playthings are so important, because for them there are 
only living things : a doll is as much a human being to a 
child as a baby is to a woman ; and also because to them 
every word is a reality. In beasts the body alone plays, 
in children the mind. Life meets them on every side ; 
they cannot comprehend death, or anything dead ; and 



86 LEVANA. 

therefore the happy beings, animating everything, sur- 
round themselves only with life, and hence it is they say, 
for instance, " The lights have covered themselves up and 
gone to bed," " Tlie spring has dressed itself," " Tlie water 
luns down the glass," " His house lives thei e," " The wind 
dances," — or of a watch from which the works are re- 
moved, " It is not alive." 

But among richer realities fancy fades and grows poor ; 
in the mean time every plaything and play-world is only 
a distaff of flax from which the soul spins a many-colored 
coat. As the rook in chess was, among different people, 
now a camel, now an elephant, a stork, a boat, a castle ; 
so among children, one plaything often acts many parts, 
and every time it seems to them, as manna did to the 
Jev.'s, the very thing they desired. The author remem- 
bers a little girl of two years old, who, after having long 
carried about an old doll reduced to the bare wood, had at 
last placed in her arms a very pretty and skilfully dressed 
one, — a foster-sister of the most beautiful in Bertuch's 
Journal des Modes, which it resembled as much in optic 
beauty as it surpassed it in size. Soon afterwards the 
child not only resumed her former conduct towards the 
wooden sloven, but went so far as to take into her arms, 
in the place of child or doll, a shabby boot-jack of her 
father's, which she nursed and rocked to sleep as lovingly 
as the above-mentioned original of Bertuch's pictures. So 
much more readily does fancy invest an invisible Adam's 
rib with human limbs and fashionable costume, than a doll 
which only differs in size from a lady, and which, on its 
side, appears to the imagination at the next tea-party so 
perfect that it can be improved in nothing. Just so the 
sfime little lassie, sitting beside the author, wrote for a 
long time with a pen dipped only in air on an ever-white 



GAMES OF CHILDREN. 87 

sheet of i^aper, until he ahnost fancied it was a satire on 
himself. Consequently do not surround your children, 
like princes' children, with a little world of the turner's ; 
do not give them eggs colored, and painted over with 
figures, but white ; they will soon from theii; own minds 
hatch the colored feathers. On the contrary, the older a 
man grows the more rich a reality should appear : the 
heath on which the youth gleaned at least the morning 
dew of the light of love grows cold with the dark night 
dew to the half-blind old man, and at last man requires a 
whole world, I mean the next, in order only to live. 

§50. 

But by the same fiincy which, like the sun, paints the 
colors on the leaves, are they also again removed from 
them. The same mistress of the robes dresses, and also 
undresses; consequently there is for children no ever- 
enduring play or plaything. Therefore do not leave a 
plaything which has lost its charm long before the eye 
conscious of the change ; lay it by. After a long time 
the dismissed favorite will be received with honor. The 
same is to be said of picture-books ; for a poetic animation 
is as necessary to the picture-book as to the play-drawer. 
A few words about that. The proper picture-books for 
ABC children do not consist of a sequence of unknown 
plants and animals, whose differences only the insti'ucted 
eye perceives, but of historical pieces which present the 
actions of animals or men taken from the child's circle. 
Then this living gallery, in whose universal history the 
child can more clearly paint the individual being than the 
reader or author can in the all-embracing generality of 
poetry, may be exalted into historic groups ; for instance, 
into a Joseph among his brethren, sellin« 



88 LEVANA. 

him, — into a Hector's farewell of wife and child, and 
such like subjects. 

Children — those of one or two years old excepted, who 
still need the spur of color — only require drawings, not 
paintings ; colors resemble the above-mentioned luxuri- 
ousness of playthings, and, by reality, weaken the cre- 
ative faculty. Therefore give no plaything whose end is 
only to be looked at ; but let every one be such as to lead 
to woi'k. For instance, a little complete mine, after being 
a few hours before the child's eyes, is altogether gone over, 
and each tiny vein of ore exhausted ; but a box of build- 
ing materials, a collection of detached houses, bridges, and 
trees, by their ever-varying location, will make him as rich 
and ha})py as an heir to the throne who makes his mental 
dispositions known by rebuilding his father's palace in the 
park. Moreover, small pictures are better than large ones. 
What is to us almost invisible, is to children only little ; 
they are physically short-sighted, consequently suited to 
what is near; and with their short yard, that is, with their 
little body, they so easily find giants everywhere, that to 
these little juveniles we should present the world on a re- 
duced scale. 

§51. 

Before the new philosophers, who in education more 
readily give everything than something, one grows so 
very much ashamed of such a paragraph as this, that one 
scarcely knows how to deck and sweeten it. I must, how- 
ever, say that, for children in their early years, I know no 
cheaper and more lasting plaything — one that is also 
clean and suited for both sexes — than what every one 
has in the pineal gland, some in the bladder, and birds in 
the stomach, — sand. I have seen children weary of play 
use it for hours as building material, as hurling machine, 



ga:^ii:s of children. 89 

as a cascade, water for washing, seed, flour, finger tickler, 
as inlaid work, and raised work, as a ground for writing 
and painting. It is to boys what water is to girls. Phi- 
losophers ! strew sand less in than before the eyes in the 
bird-cage of your children. Only one thing has to be 
cared for with regard to it, tliat they do not eat their 
plaything. 

§52. 

The second kind of play is the playing of children with 
children. If men are made for men, so are children for 
children, only much more beautifully. In their early 
years children are to one another only the completion of 
their fancy about one plaything: two fancies, like two 
flames, play near and in one another, yet ununited. 
Moreover, children alone are sufficiently childlike for 
children. But in later years the first little bond of soci- 
ety is woven of flower-garlands ; playing children are 
little European savages in social contract for the perform- 
ance of one drama. On the play-place they first issue 
from the speaking and audience hall into the true sphere 
of action, and begin their human praxis. For parents 
and teachers are ever to them those strange heaven- 
descended gods, who, according to the belief of many 
nations, appeared teaching and helping the new men on 
the new-born earth: at least they are to the child gigantic 
Titans ; — consequently in this theocracy and monarchy 
free resistance is forbidden and injurious to them, obedi- 
ence and faith serviceable and salutary. Wliere, then, can 
the child show and mature his governing power, his resist- 
ance, his forgiveness, his generosity, his gentleness in 
short, every root and blossom of society, except in freedom 
among his equals ? Teach children by cliildren 1 The 



90 LEVANA. 

entrance into tlieir play-room is for tliem an entrance into 
the great world ; and their mental school of industry is in 
the child's play-room and nursery. It is often of more 
use to a boy himself to administer the cane than to receive 
it from his tutor ; and still more to have it inflicted by 
one of his equals than by one of his superiors. If you 
wish to form a slave for hfe, fasten a boy for fifteen years 
to the legs and arms of his tutor, who is to be at once 
theatrical director, and occasional member of the two-per- 
soned company. Like all slaves, the child will probably 
keep his eye and heart armed against his tyrant's individ- 
uality ; but, accustomed to one climate, and sailing only 
with one wind, he will be unable in future to withstand 
the all-sidedness of individualities. 

§53. 

The teaching and feeding master of the little one always 
acts as if the proper life of the child, as a human being, 
were not actually begun, but waited until he himself had 
departed in order then to lay the keystone of the arch. 
Even the travelling tutor believes that, so long as he 
walks beside and sows seed in the furrow, the time of 
leaves and flowers has not arrived. For man, needing an 
external whole, wdien once an inner one animates him, 
fixes that outer one, hke the arch of the sky, and the ap- 
proach of heaven to earth, in the distance and on the hori- 
zon, although from every hill which he successively mounts 
that heaven flies away into the more distant blue ; and so 
man arrives at old age, and at last, on the mound of the 
grave, heaven rests upon earth. The whole of life is, 
then, nowhere or everywhere. Heavens ! where a man 
is, tnere eternity, not time, begins. Consequently the 
plays and actions of children are as serious and full of 



GAMES OF CHILDREN. 9I 

meaning in themselves, and in reference to their future, as 
ours are to ours. The early game becomes the earnest 
of later years ; although children in play often repeat 
something as the echo of an earlier reality, just as the 
Neapolitans play cards during theatrical representations. 
Mciser dictated his works while playing ombre : perhaps 
his have been secretly suggested to many an author by 
his early childhood's games. As chess is said to serve 
for instruction in war and government, so the future lau- 
rels and tree of knowledge grow in the play-ground. The 
bishop Alexander considered those children on wdiom 
Athanasius when a child playfully bestowed baptism to 
have been really baptized. If, as Archenholz relates, the 
boys of Winchester School once rebelled against their 
masters, garrisoned the principal entrance to the school- 
house, and provided themselves so well with arms and 
munition, that the high sheriff of the county, although he 
marched against them with 150 constables and 80 militia 
men, was yet obhged to grant an honorable capitulation, — 
I see in this angry play nothing further than the youth of 
that present (even though it be unjust) manhood, which 
bars rivers and harbors, and their own island, and on the 
sea conquers countries: so much does the foam of childish 
play subside into true wine ; and their fig-leaves conceal 
not nakedness, but sweet figs. 

§54. 
If one were to make propositions, that is, wishes, on(, 
might express this : that for every child a circle of games 
and real actions should be provided, composed of as many 
different individualities, conditions, and years as can pos- 
sibly be found, in order to prepare him in the orbis pictus 
of a diminished play-world, for the larger real one. But 



92 LEVANA. 

to give the social account of these three play provinces 
would require a book within the book. 

Moreover, I would propose pleasure and play-masters, 
as the precursors and leaders of the schoolmaster, — and 
also play-rooms, empty as those rooms on whose plaster 
walls Raphael's immortal flowers bloom, — and also play- 
gardens. And I am just reading that Grabner, in liis 
travelling description of the Netherlands, gives an account 
of play-schools, to which the Dutchman sends his children 
sooner than to the schools of instruction. Certainly if 
one of the tw^o must fall, it were better the former should 
continue in existence. 

Yet a few miscellaneous observations. Children love 
no plays so much as those in which they have something 
to expect, or to dread ; so early does the poet, wnth his 
knot making and loosing, play his part in man. From 
time to time they, like deep, unlucky players, ask for new 
cards. But this changeableness is not merely that of 
luxury, but also the consequence of their rapid growth, 
for the so quickly ripening child seeks new fruits in 
new countries, as the aged seek new ones in the old. 
Perhaps also it is the consequence of that want of a future 
and a past, whereby a child is so much more strongly 
affected and wearied by the present, as though he were 
seated in a world of sunbeams without morning and even- 
ing redness : and, lastly, for the child, to whose littleness 
not only space but time is magnified, play-hours must 
grow into play-years; and therefore we must indulge 
him, the short-sighted being, in his desire of change and 
new games. The one-houred constancy of a child equals, 
nay, surpasses, that of one month in his parents. 

The Jews forbade to celebrate two festivals on the same 
day, — a marriage, for instance, on a feast-day, or two mar- 



GAMES OF CHILDREN. 93 

riages at the same time. Should not children be refused 
in a similar manner, if, after having taken a walk on a 
summer evening, they beg leave to play in the garden, 
and then, thirdly, to bring their play-fellows into the par- 
lor for a quarter of an hour before supper ? For herein 
are children antedated groAvn-up persons ; and, while at 
work, scarcely long so much for pleasure, as for what 
comes after a pleasure ; from one sugar island they would 
at once sail over to another, and heap heaven upon 
heaven. If this fregue?itatwu}7i of the enjoyment of even 
innocent pleasures is allowed, the child, dearest mother, 
becomes only fitted for a court, or royal residence, and 
lays claim to pleasure as a right, — months of thirty-two 
days, and feast-days of twenty-five hours, each of which 
measures full sixty-one minutes. And so the little being 
is already dipped in the honey of present superabundant 
pleasure, whei'eby time clogs the butterfly-wings of the 
Psyche for every flight. The only good (if, indeed, it be 
any) that can come out of a girl thus educated, is at most 
a woman who, on vhe same day, after having received 
and paid some visits, amuses herself at the theatre, and 
then afterwards hopes for cards and dancing. 

As nature by cool, refreshing night breaks off the cul- 
minating pleasures of our constitution, always requiring 
stronger excitement; so this healtliy night-coolness should 
be given, in a mental sense, to children, in order not to 
expose them in future to the sufferings of people of the 
world and of pleasure ; who, like sea-farers in northern 
latitudes, wearied by month-long unceasing day, pray and 
bless God for a little night and candle-light. 

But let there ever be, if many games, yet few play- 
things, and not apparent, and every evening put away 
into one place, and for twins let the same piece be 



94 LEV AX A. 

doubled, as for three children trebled in order to avoid 
quarrels. 

The early games should assist the mental development, 
for the phj'sical advances gigantically without help : later 
ones should draw the physical up along with the mental, 
which, by schools and advancing years, takes the prece- 
dence. Let the child toy, sing, look, listen ; but let the 
boy and the girl run, climb, throw, build, bear heat and 
cold. 

. The most delightful and inexhaustible play is speaking ; 
first of the child with itself, and still more of the parents 
•with it. In play and for pleasure, you cannot speak too 
much with children ; nor in punishing, or teaching them, 
too little. 

Immediately after waking, the child, owing to his men- 
tal and physical excitability, requires almost nothing, still 
less you ; shortly before going to sleep, as at the burning 
out of a bonfire, a little weariness is serviceable. For 
older children, whom labor exercises and controls, its end 
(freedom), and then the open air, is itself a play. The 
open air, — an expression which Europe, like death, must 
soon exchange for the more correct one, the opener at- 
mosphere. But let not the teacher after the work also 
order and regulate the games ! It is decidedly better not 
to recognize, or make any order in games — not even 
mine — than to keep it up with difficulty and send the 
zephyrets of pleasure through artistic bellows and air- 
pumps to the little flowers. Animals and savages never 
experience tedium, neither would children if we were not 
eo very anxious to keep it away. Let the child experi- 
ence in play his future life ; and since from that the 
mountain and storm pressure of tedium cannot be removed, 
let the child sometimes feel it, in order afterwards not to 
perish under its weight. 



CHILDEEN'S DANCES. 95 



CHAPTER IV. 



I 



§55. 

KNOW not whether I should most deprecate chil- 
dren's balls, or most praise children's dances ! The 
former — before the dancing-master, in the society of 
lookers-on and fellow-dancers, in the hot temperature 
of the ball-room, and among its hot products — are, in the 
highest degree, the front ranks and leading-steps to the 
dance of death. On the contrary, children's dances are 
what I will now commend more at large. 

As the first speech long precedes grammar, so should 
dancing precede, and prc[)are the way for, the ai't of 
dancing. A father who has an old piano, or fiddle, or 
flute, or an improvising singing voice, should call his own 
and neighbor's children together, and let them every day 
for an hour hop and turn by his orchestra, in pairs, in 
rows, in circles, very frequently alone, accompanying 
themselves with singing, as their own gi'inding organ ; 
and also in any way they like. In the child happiness 
dances ; in the man, at most, it only smiles or weeps. 
The mature man can in dancing only express the beauty 
of the art, not himself and his emotions : love would 
thereby comport itself too rudely, joy too loudly and boldly, 
before the stern Nemesis. In the child, body and soul 
still live united in their honeymoon, and the active body 
dances after the happy soul ; until afterwards both sepa- 
rate from bed and board, and at last entirely leave one 
another. In later times the light zephyr of contentment 
cannot turn the heavy metal standard to point its course. 



q6 LEVANA. 

§56. 
Children are like Forrer's watches, which wind them- 
selves up if you walk about with them. As in the old 
astronomy, eleven of their heavens are movable, and 
only one, that of sleep, stationary. It is only dancing in 
a circle that is liglit enough for a cliild ; only for youth is 
a straight course not too difficult. As to the heavenly 
bodies, so to children, do the motion and music of the 
spheres belong ; whereas the older body, like water, takes 
the straight path. To speak more plainly : Women, it is 
well known, cannot run, but only dance ; and every one 
would more easily reach, by dancing than by walking, a 
post-house, to which, instead of a straight poplar alley, a 
lordly row of trees, planted in the English fashion, con- 
ducted. Now children are diminutive women, — at least 
boys are, although girls are often only diminutive boys. 
Dancing is the easiest of all movements, because it needs 
the least space, and is the most varied : hence joy is not 
a runner, but a dancer : hence the indolent savage dances, 
and the wearied negro slave rouses himself, by dancing, 
to fresh exertion: hence the runner — all other circum- 
stances being the same — has more frequently fiillen down 
dead than the dancer. Hence camels and armies and 
Oriental laborers continue their laborious marches for a 
longer time, and with more ease, to the sound of music ; 
not principally because music produces cheerfulness, — that 
might easily be attained by other pleasures, — but because 
music rounds off the straight movement into the circling 
dance and its still returning rhythm ; for it is only in a 
circular, not in a straight line, that everything returns in 
thirds. As an argumentative or a narrative sequence 
(science or history) prepares us by every effort of atten- 
tion for a still stronger, whereas the zigzag of the epigram 



CHILDREN'S DANCES. 97 

each moment compels us to a new beginning and fresh 
exertion ; so physically the same is the case in running 
and walking, in which, up hill or down hill, no effort is 
cause of its successor, but the great follows the little, or 
the strongest the strongest, as the case may be : in dan- 
cing, on the contrary, without aim or compulsion, one 
movement constantly springs out of the other, and renders 
cessation, rather than continuance, difficult. All running, 
but no dancing, desires an end. What better movement, 
then, can there be for children, than this revolving one ? 
The gymnastic of running, going on stilts, climbing, &c., 
steels and hardens individual forces and muscles, whereas 
dancing, on the contrary, like a physical poetry, exercises 
and equalizes all the muscles. 

§57. 

Further, the harmony connected with it imparts to the 
affections and the mind that metrical order which reveals 
the highest, and regulates the beat of the pulse, the step, 
and even the thoughts. Music is the metre of this poetic 
movement, and is an invisible dance, as dancing is a silent 
music. Finally this also ranks among the advantages of 
this eye and heel pleasure ; that children with children, 
by no harder canon than the musical, hght as sound, may 
be joined in a rosebud-feast, without thorns or strife. 

In short, dancing cannot come soon enough, " but the 
dancing-master may more easily come too soon than too 
late." This last part appears in the first edition. I 
should, perhaps, more correctly have written singing than 
dancing master, because those skilled in the art declare 
that the early exercise of the voice is injurious to it. The 
first edition is only right in so far as it may to the utmost 
remove children, brought up in genteel coquetry, from the 



98 LEVAXA. 

influence of the dancing-master, who would reduce all 
bodily movements to rule and system. On the other side, 
again, the second edition is right, if it add, that better- 
educated children, who in their eighth and ninth years, 
instead of vanity, know only the law of the good and the 
beautiful, may join with less danger to their higher self 
the trivial regiment and ruling fiddle of the dancing-mas- 
ter in their early years, when they can learn to dance, as 
to w^alk and to read, without coquetry. Then also the 
dancing-hour may become an hour of freedom and play 
to those poor persecuted children who are treated like 
goats, whose sinews are cut to prevent them from jumping. 



CHAPTER V. 



MUSIC. 

§58. 

MUSIC, the only fine art in which man and all 
classes of animals — spiders, mice, elephants, fish, 
amphibious creatures, birds — have a community of 
goods, must ceaselessly affect the child, who is the spir- 
itual man and the brute beast united. And so one might 
break the heart of the little new possessor of life with a 
trumpet, and its ear with shrieks and discord. There- 
fore, it is probable that the first music, perhaps, as an un- 
dying echo in the child, forms the secret thorough-bass, 
the melodious theme in the brain-chambers of a future 
master of sound, which his after compositions only harmo- 
niously vary. 



MUSIC. 99 

Music, rather than poetry, should be called " the happy 
art." She imparts to children nothing but heaven, for as 
yet they have not lost it, and lay no memories as muflflers 
on the clear sounds. Choose melting melodies, and soft 
strains ; even with those you only excite the child to frisk 
and dance about. Savages, powerful and pleasure-loving 
people, such as Greeks, Russians, and Neapolitans, have 
their popular songs set entirely in minor keys. For 
some years the child, like the father, can weep at certain 
sounds ; but in him it arises from overflowing happiness, 
for as yet the memory does not place beneath those tune- 
ful hopes the reckoning of its losses. 

§59. 

Yet among all the instruments which sound in Haydn's 
child's concerts, that best serves the purposes of educa- 
tional music which is born with the performer, — the voice. 
In the childhood of nations speaking was singing. Let 
this be repeated in the childhood of the individual. In 
singing, the human being, harmony and heart coalesce at 
the same time in one breast, whereas instruments seem 
only to lend him a voice : with what arms can a parent 
more closely and more gently draw the little beings to- 
wards him, than with his spiritual ones, with the tones of 
his own heart, with the same voice which always speaks 
to them, but now transfigured into a musical ascension ? 

Thereby they have the advantage and the conscious- 
ness that they can imitate it on the spot. Singing takes 
the place of screaming, which the doctors so much praise 
as a palcestra for the lungs, and first military exercise of 
speech. Is there anything more beautiful than a merry 
singing child? And how unweariedly he repeats the 
same thing, whicli is so repulsive to the little soul in aU 



loo LEVANA. 

Other games ! As in maturer age, the Alpine shepherd 
and the chained laborer sing away their vacancy, and 
long hours of compulsory sitting, so the child sings away 
cliildliood, and sings on, hearing only himself. For har- 
mony, like the innaie poetry of the feelings, says nothing 
but the same thing, unsatiated by repetition, unwearied 
by sound. 

Let the father, like the Frieslander, follow the proverb, 
— Frisia non cantaf, — and never or seldom sing : I 
would wish him to do it for his children, and the mother 
for him and them. 

§60. 

As one drops asleep by inward hstening to smging, so 
one might, at least in a case where immediate waking is 
necessary (always a most undesirable thing), effect it by 
music, as Montaigne's father did. A flute-playing clock 
would be a good awakener. And why should not har- 
mony be employed as a soul-curative means against the 
maladies of children, agamst vexation, obstinacy, anger ? 



CHAPTER VI. 

COMMANDS, PROHIBITIONS, PUNISHMENTS, AND CRYING. 
§ Gl. 

ROUSSEAU could not write these paragraphs ; for 
he was of a different opinion. But I agree with 
Basedow, and do not believe, with the former, that the 
parental will can and ought to assume the appearance of 



COMMANDS, PROHIBITIONS. lOI 

a mere accident. Rewarding and punishing merely by 
physical consequences and regulations, and in fact the 
whole of Rousseau's system of education, would throw 
away a grown-up man for the sake of a growing one : 
but life is not given to pass merely from education again 
to education. Rousseau himself admits that only an ap- 
proach to his plan is possible : but then one is just as far 
as ever from the goal ; since here it does not depend on 
the failure of a degree, but of a species. Fortunately this 
erroneous course is closed against the child's mind. 

How, then, would the child attain the after-feeling of 
necessity, without the fore-feeling of freedom, which he 
must see as strong in others, or in his equals, as in him- 
self? Much more must the child — proceeding from 
himself — regard all things, even dead matter, as free, 
and be exasperated with every opposition, as though it 
were intentional. The deeper the chain of souls hangs 
down, the broader does the free ocean flow around. The 
dog bites the stone, — the child strikes both, — the savage 
sees in the storm a war kindled and led by spirits. It is 
only to the clearer eye that that dark iron mass \vliich we 
call necessity stands in the midst of the universe like a 
black sun. Even this it is that first draws the free spirit, 
which begins and ends in freedom, out of understanding 
into reason, out of the finite into infinitude. The child, 
then, who makes everything into an independent being, 
consequently yourself in the first place, finds in every 
occurrence a premeditated course of action, and in every 
hinderance an enemy. Do not we olaer ones experience, 
during our whole life, the iron power of nature, yet with- 
out resigning ourselves calmly and uncomplainingly to it, 
when, for instance, it either closes it irremediably, as in 
death, or imbitters it, as in old age ? And whence do 



I02 LEVANA. 

physical consequences obtain their educational reputation, 
except from the unchangeableness of nature ? Now free- 
will may appear to the child just as consequential and 
immovable I Then he beholds a higher than blind ne- 
cessity. Further, is there any necessity which better 
teaches endurance than the mental one of a foreign will ? 
Finally, how can trust in men — that noble bond of hu- 
man and higher oneness — come to life m a child without 
some object, without a parent's w^ord on which he may 
confide ? 

§ 62. 

The modes, then, of commanding and forbidding are 
all that come under consideration. And here we must 
entreat pardon for the disorderly ranks of a merely ex 
perimental system of education. 

Take no pleasure in ordering to do or not to do, but in 
the child's free action. In frequent orders the parent's 
advantage is more considered than the child's. 

Let the child be irresistibly bound by your word, but 
not you yourself: you need not give any edicta perpetua, 
but your lawgiving power can each day issue new decre- 
tals and pastoral letters. 

Forbid seldomer by actions than by words : do not 
snatch the knife out of the child's hands, but let him 
lay it down himself at your desu'e ; in the first case he 
obeys the pressure of a foreign power, in the second 
its guidance. 

Let your tables of the law be unbroken, and in raised 
character. Rather forbid the whole, if it is difficult for 
you to separate its parts; for instance, touching the 
table at all, though you may only wish to protect some 
articles upon it. 

Let the cliild learn in himself the right he demands 



COMMANDS, PROHIBITIONS. 103 

from others. Consequently let the respect for property 
be decidedly and unsparmgly exacted from him. What 
belongs to the child ? Father and mother, nothing more : 
everything eLse belongs to them. But as every man de- 
sires a world, yea, a whole universe, ybr his patrimony, 
mete out little to the little one, and say, — " No more ! " 

The child's ear readily distinguishes a decided from an 
angry tone of voice : the mother easily falls into the lat- 
ter when she attempts to imitate the father in the former. 
His commands are better obeyed than hers, for three rea- 
sons : the first, his decided, though far removed from 
angry voice, has been already mentioned. The second 
is, that the man, for the most part, like the warrior, says 
only one, and consequently the same, imperial No ; 
whereas women can^-scarcely say to a child, Be quiet ! 
without colon and semicolon, and most necessary notes of 
interrogation and exclamation. Was there ever in his- 
tory an instance of a woman training a dog ? Or could a 
generaless, in commanding her marching army to halt, 
ever express herself otherwise than thus : " All you 
people, as soon as I have done speaking, I command you 
all to stand still in your places ; halt, I tell you ! " The 
third reason is, that the man more rarely withdraws his 
refusal. 

The best rule in politics is said to be " pas trop gou- 
verner " : it is also true in education. But some teachers, 
in order to be always talking, and rather to resemble 
ringing silver than dead-sounding gold, preach as often 
against faults and in favor of virtues which come with 
years, as against faults and for virtues which increase 
with age ; why, for instance, is there so much precipitate 
haste about learning to walk, to knit, to read, as if these 
arts must not finally come of themselves ? But quite dif- 



I04 LEVAXA. 

-J 
ferent things are, ibr example, pure enunciation, correct 

writing, and holding the pen and person properly while 
so engaged, a sense of order, and generally those capabil- 
ities which only grow with years. Since, unfortunately, 
independently of these things, education and instruction 
require so many words, spare using them against fading 
faults, and direct them against growing ones. Frugal 
speech cultivates and strains the powers of the interpret- 
ing child, as riddles do. Grown people do the same 
towards one another : for instance, a great man of my 
acquaintance says at first, among a circle of strangers, 
little more than hum, hum, and that very low ; but just 
as (according to the Indian myth) the silent godhead in- 
terrupted his eternity, and creation began, only because 
he in a similar way said, "oum"; so this said man, merely 
by his " hum," gives every one much to think of. Yes, I 
know^ even a greater and more useful one-syllableness 
than even the Chinese : that is no-syllableness, or silence. 
Young doctors, who do not wish to forget natural philoso- 
phy in their usual medical sciences, very often make use 
of it, in their examinations before the collegium medicum, 
in reply to very common questions ; as Socrates was 
silent when angry, so they wish by silence to express 
their indignation at questions about miserable sciences to 
which they have always remained strangers. 

/But to return from this digression, — which can less be 
ranked among the improvements than among the addi- 
tions to the second edition, — many of us teachers accom- 
pany our commands and prohibitions with moral reasons 
on their way to the heart, which are mere superficiality, 
for the child's conscience itself affords their strongest 
proof: but a sequence of reasons is usefil in connection 
with medicinal, gymnastic, and other commands, which 



COMMANDS, PROHIBITIONS. I05 

rind in the child, instead of an advocate, only curiosity 
and ignorance. 

Further, we grown-up people all have and admit 
(though without deriving any peculiar benefit from it) the 
fault of considering every difference of a child from our- 
selves as a faihng, our scoldings as lessons, childish errors 
as greater than our own ; and thence it is we so thought- 
lessly convert our educational rein and leading-strings 
into a hanging rope, and would willingly carve the child 
into a neat cork Swiss model of our Alps (as Pfyffer does 
the lofty mountains) ; and thence it is also, since the like 
is not easily accomplished, that we talk on and on, like 
the shell sea-trumpet which ceaselessly sounds, and with 
our school-chalk draw and lengthen the broad stroke be- 
fore the beak of the poor hen, so that she may always 
stare down on the same line without being able to look 
upwards. 

Even a grown-up man whom some one should follow 
all day long with movable pulpit and stool of confession, 
from wdiich to hurl sermons and anathemas, could never 
attain any real activity and moral freedom ; how much 
less, then, a weak child, who at every step in life must b^ 
entangled in a "stop — run — be quiet — do that!" I; 
is the same fault as that filling and cramming of the day 
with mere lessons; under which rain-spout of instruction 
princely children especially stand, as if to make up b^^ 
that flow of teaching for the future ebb of learning. And 
what else, in fact, is this but unceasingly to sow one field 
full of seed upon seed ? A dead corn-granary may pos^ 
sibly come out of it, but no living harvest-field. Or, in 
another simile, your watch stops while you wind it up, 
and you everlastingly wind up children and never lei 
them go. 

5* 



lo6 LEVANA. 

The reason why children dread the fire, which always 
burns, more than the knife, which does not always cut, 
applies to their different kind of fear of father and of 
mother: he is the fire, she the knife. The difference 
does not lie in their severity, for an angry mother is se- 
verity itself, but in their unchangeablcness. The younger 
the child the more necessary is one-syllableness ; yes, 
even that is not necessary ; shake the head, and let that 
be enough. At most say, Pst ! Later on, give the rea- 
sons in a gentle voice, merely to render obedience easier 
by the fair tokens of love. For vehement refusal pro- 
duces in the child vehement demand. 

Forbid in a gentle voice, so that a whole gamut of in- 
creased force may be open to you, and only once. The 
last may cost labor. Even in the child that human sys- 
tem of delay rules, which for every rapid determination 
must have time for three words of command and three 
summonses, together with some hours of grace. Do not, 
then, be more angry than is fitting, if a child, for instance, 
closes a forbidden noise with a so finely graduated Alle- 
gro ma non troppo and mancando, that you yourself at 
last cannot accurately distinguish resistance from obedi- 
ence. Here there remains no choice but either punish- 
ment for the most infinitely small disobedience, or, after 
the first obedience, indifference to the rest: the latter 
seems to me the best. But there is a more beautiful lin- 
gering, the parental. The first and quickest word which 
a father gives to a begging child, or wife, or servant i&, 
No; thereupon he endeavors to grant the request, and 
says Yes at the end instead of at the beginning. The 
mother does still worse. Can you, then, obtain from 
yourself no respite, no interval, before decision, for the 
child, or whoever it be, by merely answering to every re- 



COMMANDS, PROHIBITIONS. 107 

quest, " Come again," or "After this," or "In three Saxon 
minutes of rest"? Women, I would only recommend 
you this law of delay, in order to be less frequently in 
opposition to others. Another parental delay, that of 
punishment, is of use for children of the second five years 
(quinquennium). Parents and teachers would more fre- 
quently punish according to the line of exact justice, if, 
after every fault in a child, they would only count four 
and twenty, or their buttons, or their fingers. They 
would thereby let the deceiving present round themselves, 
as well as round the children, escape ; the cold, still em- 
pire of clearness would remain behind, and the child, as 
well as the father, (granting, for instance, that anger 
would else have been the object as well as the mediator 
of the punishment, or the correction also the repetition of 
the fault.) would learn, in the reflected mutual pain to 
regard that of the other. Beccaria rightly attaches the 
punishment, or hangman, close to the heels of the crim- 
inal, because compassion and oblivion would else only act 
against, not in favor of, the executioner ; but the presup- 
posed wide-extended despotism of the parental law ad- 
mits of the softening interval of time before the spectators, 
as well as before the child, and in the rulers themselves. 
Only with regard to your youngest children attach the 
punishment to the very fault, like a physical effect to its 
cause. 

§ 63. 

After unchangeable biddings and forbiddings, one might 
also recommend to the parents some wishes, whose fulfil- 
ment would depend solely on the love and free choice of 
the children, in order to exercise them in freedom and 
love and merit. I will do so. 

The obedience of children, in itself alone, without con- 



loS I.i: VAXA. 

sidoralion of its motivo, can li;\vt» no other value than thaf 
thereby nnieh is made easier to the parents. Or would 
it be good lor the soul's growth, suppose your ehild al- 
ways submitted, bent and broke his will to that of others 
as to yours ? What a pliable, dislocated human member, 
bound on the wheel of fortune, would the child then be ! 
Hut what you desire is, uot his obedience, but his inclina- 
tion to it, love, trust, self-denial, the grateful reverence 
for the best (namely, his parents) ! And in so far you 
are right, But therefore take care to command nothing 
to which the higher motive does not itself call and incline 
you. To forbid will irritate less and cause to err a child 
who regards everything as the independent property of 
his parents, than to conunand : since the young spirit 
already knows that he has at least one property, himself 
and justice. ]Mothers willingly call to the help of their 
biddings and forbiddings the dissipating method, which by 
pleasurable by-ways conceals from the child the goal of 
authoritative command. But by this flattering mummery 
the child learns no rule and no discipline, but, before his 
short-siglited eye, all right and steadiness is converted 
into a merry game of chance, which hardens and accus- 
toms him to nothing. 

Further, the children, always only the receivers of their 
l>arents' gifts, are themselves sometimes gladly the hosts 
of their hosts, and do the work of love more cheerfully 
than that of necessity ; just as their parents more willing- 
ly give than pat/. Let, then, the request be prolTered in 
the gentlest tone of voice (but without giving any rea- 
sons), and recompensed by gladness at its fullilment ; yet 
let not its refusal be punished. Only the slave is lashed 
to over-service ; even the camel moves no swifter before 
the whip, only behind the llute. Children, it has been 



PUNISIKMENTS. 109 

remarked, have a particular afFection for the station of 
tlieir grandparents ; and how comes this, but because 
they requirxi and order httle, and consequently their 
grandchildren receive it the more willingly from them ? 
Finally, can you more beautifully and soothingly extin- 
guish the memory of a punishment than, when it is over, 
making the child happy by expressing a wish for a little 
act of courtesy to some one ? More of this in the chapter 
on the education of the affections. 



CHAPTER VII, 

PUNISHMENTS. 
§ 64. 



f^r^HIS unc'i^Hlike word will scarcely issue from mj 
Jl. pen : I would rather write pain or after-smart. 
Punishment should only apply to guilty conscience, and 
in the beginning"- children, like animals, have only an inno- 
cent one. They, as the fixed stars viewed from moun- 
tains, should nev^r tremble ; and the earth should seem 
to tlieni, as it would do from a star, glorious, shining, not 
earthy black. Or if you necessitate them to sacinfice and 
pawn their irrecoverable May-time, in order that they 
may thoroughly enjcv its inmost kernel in some subse- 
quent tempestuous pcfind of life, do you advise them 
anything different from wWt thft Indian does, who buries 
his gold in order to ^oijoy it I3 tli« :^*».-x;t world, afier he 
himself is buried ? 

Great rewards, say >^omt;souieu^ betoka^ a xklling 



no LEVANA. 

state ; the same is true of great punishments in the 
school-house ; yea, and in the state also. Not great but 
unavoidable punishments are mighty, truly almighty. 
Hence most police punishments are usury, — punishing 
M'ith pounds where pennies would suffice, — so also are 
torturing cruelties, because no one dreads the wheel who 
scorns the gallows. There exists in men a fearful cruelty; 
as compassion can grow into positive pain, so the inflic- 
tion of pain for punishment can grow into pleasure. It is 
strange, but to be proved by schoolmasters, soldiers, rus- 
tics, hunters, overseers of slaves, and murderers, and by 
the French revolution, that wrathful cruelty is easily 
fanned into a pleasurable sensation, to which screams, 
tears, and flowing wounds actually become a refreshing 
spring to the thirst for blood. Among the people the 
blows of fate on the parents usually beget, as in a stormy 
sky, retahating blows on the children. Common mothers 
strike their own children the harder because they see 
strangers do it, or because they cry too much, or be- 
cause they are too silent. Is it more our subjection to 
jurist Rome, — which considered children, as well as 
women, slaves, and those who were not Romans as 
things, not men, — or more our reverence for the domes- 
tic sanctuary, which explains the indifference with which 
the state beholds the painful judgments of parents and 
teachers, the tortures of defenceless innoce' ce ? 

§65. 
If the ancient Goths, Greenlanders, Quakers, and even 
savages, form tranquil and brave children-souls, without 
the cane, round which ours must twine like tame snakes, 
we may perceive how ill we use the twig which must 
afterwards be thickened to a stick. The one ouglit to 



PUNISHMENTS. Ill 

have rendered the other unnecessary. Even the smallest 
rod should only be used occasionally as paradigma and 
theme of the future ; afterwards the mere threatening 
preaches and restrains. At the same time the reproach 
of Goths and savages, that blows destroy the courage of 
a boy, proves rather too much, because it would equally 
serve against every useful preventive which teaches by 
pain ; for instance, burning the finger, and, moreover, may 
be disproved, partly by the example of the common Ger- 
man soldier, who probably gives as many blows in war as 
he received in time of peace, and also, partly, by that of 
the officers, with whom sometimes the opposite is the case. 

A child who strikes should be struck, and best by the 
object itself, if he is old enough ; by the servants, for in- 
stance. If a child is struck, say a girl, the father may be 
her curator sexus (guardian of the sex) ; on the contrary, 
if it be a boy who struck a boy, he would not deserve the 
future man's hat if he rather raised his voice than his 
hand, and took refuge in his father's revenging stick. 

Never let the contest of parental and childish obstinacy 
take place ; the one in punishing persistency to obtain its 
object, the other in enduring refractoriness. After a cer- 
tain amount of exerted authority, leave to the grieved 
child the victory of No ; you may be certain he will the 
next time avoid so painful a one. 

Tremblingly I venture to propose suggestive questions, 
presupposive of the matter, — such, it is w^ell known, are 
forbidden to judges, because they would thereby attach to 
the prisoner's answer what they had first derived from it ; 
and because, by this blackening of forbidden wares, they 
would soon arrive at the blackening of the accused, thus 
urged to stumble. At the same time I wov Id permit the 
educator occasionally to make use of such questions. If 



112 LEVANA. 

lie knows, with every likelihood of truth, that the child, for 
instance, has been on the ice, contrary to his order, he 
may, by the first question, which only concerns indifferent 
by-circumstances, as how long he has been on the pond, 
and who was sliding with him, take away from him at 
once the wish and the attempt to pay the inquirer with 
the false silver of a lie, — a wish and an attempt to which 
the simple question, whether he had remained in the 
house, would have afforded room and temptation. It is 
impossible that wickedness and presence of mind can be 
so great in a child, that in this confusing assault he will 
declare the seeming omniscience of the parental inquiry 
to be a lie by himself giving a bold lying denial of the 
fact. Children, like savages, have a propensity to lie, 
which has chiefly reference to the past, and behind which, 
as Rousseau's lie about the ribbon proves, the truthfulness 
of riper years is developed. Baser and more dangerous 
than lies about what is past are prospective lies, or those 
about the future, by which the child, else the echo of the 
present, annihilating himself, declares, with the conscious- 
ness of doing so, the design of a long contrary course of 
bad action : the lie of the past steals good money, the lie 
of the future coins false. The carefully moral use of a 
similar leading question at least renders difficult the so 
dangerous success of the titular truth of a lie ; for one 
successful lie is the mother of lies; and out of every wind- 
egg the Devil hatches his basilisks. 

One word about after-anger ! A serious punishment 
of a child is scarcely so important as the quarter of an 
hour immediately succeeding, and the transition to for- 
giveness. After the hour of storm every seed-word finds 
a softened warm ground ; fear and hatred of the punish- 
ment, which at first hardened and struggled against what 



PUNISHMENTS. II3 

was said, are now past, and gentle instruction falls in and 
heals, as honey relieves a sting, and oil cures wounds. 
During this hour one may speak much, if the gentlest 
possible tone of voice be used, and soften the grief of 
others by showing our own. But every long winter of 
•after-wrath is poisonous; at most an after-grief, not an 
after-punishment, is allowable. Mothers, viewing every- 
thing on the foot of love, and so treating tbeir children 
like their husbands, fall easily into this after-punishment, 
chiefly because it better agrees with their activity, gladly 
dividing itself into little parts, and because they, unlike 
the man, who sets the stem round with thorns, willingly 
cover the leaves with prickles. I have, dearest lady- 
readers, met the gentlest, mildest " Blondinas '* in public 
places, who, nevertheless, in the nursery (and in the ser- 
vants' hall too), resembled beautiful white roses, which 
prick as sharply as the fullest and reddest. Unfortunately 
it is often the case that women, like so many authors (my- 
self, for example), do not know when to stop and say, 
Halt ! A word which I have hitherto vainly sought in 
every female dictionary, and in every female street-quar- 
rel. Now this after-anger, this should-be-punishing ap- 
pearance of loving less, either passes over the child, living 
only in the present, and resembling a beast which imme- 
diately after the greatest pain and madness eats on peace- 
ably, without being understood and without having any 
effect ; or, from tbe same sense of the present, the child 
reconciles himself to the want of marks of affection, and 
learns to do without love : or his little heart is imbittered 
by the continued punishment of a buried fault ; and so by 
this after-rancor the beautiful affecting passage to forgive- 
ness is lost, which by long gradations is weakened. But 
afterwards this after-tax of punishment, so dear to women, 



114 LEVANA. 

maj do good service, when the girl is about thirteen years 
old, and the boy fourteen : this later, riper age counts so 
much past in its present, that the long, regretful seriousness 
of a father or a mother must move and influence a youth 
or a maiden at the time when their hearts thirst for love ; 
in this case coldness ripens and sweetens the fruit, whereas 
earlier it only kills the blossom. Is there anything more 
beautiful than a mother who, after a punishment, speaks 
to her child with gentle earnestness and serious love ? 
And yet there is something even more beautiful, — a 
father who does the same. 

What is to be followed as a rule of prudence, yea, of 
justice, towards grown-up people, should be much more 
observed towards children ; namely, that one should never 
judgingly declare, for instance, " You are a liar," or even, 
'• You are a bad boy," instead of saying, " You have told 
an untruth," or " You have done wrong." For since the 
power to command yourself implies at the same time the 
power of obeying, man feels, a minute after his fault, as 
free as Socrates ; and the branding mark of his nature^ 
not of the deed, must seem to him a blameworthy punish- 
ment. To this must be added, that every individual's 
w^rong actions, owing to his inalienable sense of a moral 
aim and hope, seem to him only short, usurped interreg- 
nums of the Devil, or comets in the uniform solar system. 
The child, consequently, under such a moral annihilation, 
feels the wrong-doing of others more than his own ; and 
this all the more because in him want of reflection, and 
the general warmth of his feelings, represent the injustice 
of others in a more ugly light than his own. 

If it be permitted to the state only to declare actions, 
not men, dishonorable, — except in cases where it ad- 
judges the loss of life with that of honor, because loss of 



PUNISHMENTS. ti^ 

honor is the extinction of humanity ; and ^Yely heart, 
however degraded, still preserves indestructible the life- 
germ that may grow up into the restoration of the man ; 
— then is it still more sinful, by the cruel frost of igno- 
minious punishment, to injure this life-seed in the child, 
which as yet only bears unripe and growing members. 
You may give him, as rewards, coats of arms, chains and 
stars of orders, and doctors' hats, — or, as punishments, 
take all these away ; but do not let the punishments of 
honor be greater ; that is to say, do not let them be posi- 
tive, as the dunces' caps, and wooden horses of many 
schools are. Shame is the cold Orcus of the inner man ; 
a spiritual hell, without redemption, wherein the damned 
can become nothing else but at most one devil more. 
Therefore, even Gedicken's advice, to oblige a child deserv- 
ing punishment to write a theme about his fault, is to be 
rejected (except at a somewhat later period) ; for what else 
can this raking up of the inner slough produce but either 
foul, complete sinking and incrustation of the fallen child, 
or poisonous stunning of the better by marsh exhalations ? 
And does not the tender being thus harden and accustom 
himself to a contradiction between words and feelings ? 
Somewhat similar is the punishment of kissing the hand 
which has inflicted chastisement. The state and educa- 
tion do so mutually work after and imitate one another ! 
I only cite as an example the disgraceful retractation of an 
injury. For as no civic power can remove the opinion 
of the injurer, the command to revoke his words is only 
the command for a lie, and every other punishment would 
be juster, and more acceptable, than this dictated self- 
profanation, whereby the man — against other rules of 
justice — must show himself up as the house-witness of 
his own shame. Only the judge, not one of the parties, 



Il6 LEVANA. 

can justly (not morally) restore honor to the other ; for 
else he could also take away what he had again given. 
Still stranger is it that in the more refined degrees of 
recantation the defendant loses in his own honor what of 
another's he restores to the plaintiff, — like a master of 
the mint who becomes bankrupt. But back to our ill- 
treated child ! Are not the wounds which an honored 
warrior scarcely feels made deep and burning by dis- 
honor? so the dishonored and helpless being struck by 
two blows hangs between heaven and earth, scourged 
both in body and soul, and languishingly desolate. But, 
ye parents and teachers, in a less degree, but in the same 
way, do you inflict inward and outward torments on the 
weak hearts when, — as is so often, — you surround with 
thorns the corporeal, or other punishments, by derision 
of their appearance, or by ludicrous names. Never let 
the least pain be inflicted scoffingly, but seriously, oftener 
sadly. The sorrow of the parents purifies that of the 
child. For example, if the royal pupil of Fenelon gave 
way to ebullitions of passion, this bishop of Cambray — 
more properly of Patmos, for he might have been the 
second disciple whom Jesus loved — commanded all the 
servants to wait on the king's son seriously and silently, 
and so let stillness preach. 



SCREAMING AND CRYING OF CHILDREN. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

SCREAMING AND CRYING OP CHILDREN. 

THE best about this is already written, and the glean- 
ings, too, along with it. All that need be done more 
is, — to do what is written ; and this I expect from the 
women for the first time, if they have children in the 
second world, or at all events in the third. But now 
their weak, five-sensed heart is driven to and fro by the 
crying and screaming of children, as by winds and waves ; 
and, since they themselves often perform miracles with 
the liquidizing blood of St. Januarius, that is, with tears, 
it is natural that they should melt at the flowing tears of 
others. Only to the man, for whom eye-water frequently 
becomes a petrifying water, shall a few mollifying con- 
siderations be here presented ; so that every screaming of 
a child shall not make him a savage, a beast, and worse 
than a beast. 

As Rubens by one stroke converted a laughing into a 
crying child, so nature frequently makes this stroke in the 
original : a child's eye, like the sun, never draws water so 
readily as in the liot temperature of pleasure ; for in- 
stance, after the return from a playing party of children. 
Their mirth very easily passes beyond the first extreme 
verge, which, by exhaustion, leads to the second. More- 
over, consider that children have their hypochondriacal 
sufferings, days and hours of rain, just as much as their 
parents ; that the four great seasonal wheels on quarter- 
days also affect young nerves, and that the child's quick- 



Il8 LEVANA. 

silver easily fiills and rises with that in the glass, before 
storms and cold weather.* 

You should not, however, consider it in order to give 
more way to it, or more to ward it off, but just to make 
nothing out of it, neither anxiety nor sermons. 

Since women so willingly translate their sensations 
into words, and by their talkativeness distinguish them- 
selves, more than we do ourselves, from parrots, among 
which class of birds the females talk little, — hence only 
the males are brought to Europe, — so we must consider 
the prologue to speech in little girls, that is, some crying 
and screaming, as the overflow of the future stream. A 
boy must digest his pain without water, a girl may have 
a few drops after it. 

Children have, in common with weak men, an incapa- 
bility of instantaneous cessation from what they are doing. 
Often no threatening can stop their laughter : remember 
the converse in their crying, in order to treat their weak- 
ness as a physician rather than as a judge. 

§ 67. 

We may divide children's hurts, or crying at hurts, 

into four, like the four feelers of a snail, with which they 

touch the ground. First, screaming about some outward 

hurt, a fall, for instance. Here nothing is more injurious 

* The parallel line, or rather parallel zigzag, between our corpo- 
real world and the outer universe would have been correctly laid 
down long ago if the great changes produced by the weather in our 
bodies had not appeared in the tceaker part before their occurrence, in 
«ome along with it, and in sironcjer natures afterwards, so that the 
same weather makes one person ill, which seems to restore another, 
on whom, in fact, the future is exerting its influence. From a similar 
reason the mother of the ebb and flow of the tide, the moon, Avas so 
long unknown, because they followed her after an interval of hours or 
even days. 



SCREAMING AND CRYING OF CHILDREN. II9 

than — what is so desirable in all requisitions to the 
child — the soft, compassionate mother's voice : the com- 
passion of another joins in with what he feels for himself, 
and he cries on for pleasure. Either say, dryly, " Cour- 
age," " Be quiet," " It does n't signify " ; or, still better, 
repeat some merry old Da-capo word, " Hoppa," for in- 
stance. The strength or weakness of the child must 
decide whether you should in the first case choke the 
pain by an absolute forbiddal of its outbreak, — since 
victory over the sign by distraction and division becomes 
a victory over the thing, — or, in the second, let nature 
heal itself by those inner-home methods, which in grown- 
up people are exclamations and curses, and tears and 
noise. You need not answer me, " Very common ad- 
vice," for I reply, " But of very rare accomplishment." 
The unaltered course of old counsellors ought to produce 
an improved one in the hearers. 

§68. 
In the second kind of crying, on the contrary, that 
caused by illness, the gentle, soothing mother's voice is in 
its right place, — namely, by the sick-bed. And for what 
other reason than this, because the little spiritual I or 
I-let, whose place it is to govern and direct the physical, 
is itself attacked and plundered, and the mind, lying in 
iron chains, knows not how to bear " the order of the iron 
crown " ? Here you must indulge complainings, yet 
without paying more attention to them than at other 
times. Maintain the spiritual regimen, even if you must 
change the physical. Children in sickness are morally 
distorted ; the sick-bed improves, the sick-cradle injures. 
]N'o sick child ever yet died of good education. But 
why are we so serious on this point, but because too 



lib LEVAXA. 

frequently, in private, the whole education of childish 
humanity is only made into the nurse of physical pro- 
gress ; as (if the expression may be allowed) men use 
the holy breath of life to turn the sails of windmills, and 
the next world as a swimming bladder on our earth ? 
Bad enough ! Every unholy thing sets before itself (and 
others) a period from which it will first begin to contem- 
plate the eternity of the Holy ; as if humanity were 
attached to some future year, the twentieth, thirtieth, 
sixtieth, instead of to every present moment. Where, 
and in what age and place, will the fear of hurting life 
by the strict consistency of education be overcome ? 
Think always only of the best ; the good will soon ap- 
pear. 

§69. 

The third kind of crying is that used to get something. 
Here hold fast Rousseau's advice, — Never let the child 
obtain an inch of ground by this war-cry ; only the mis- 
fortune is, women are never to be moved to this patient 
indifference towards screaming. But they say to him, 
" No, you shall have nothing while you are so paughty ; 
but, when you have done crying, you shall see w^hat I 
will give you." And does the little despot want anything 
more ? The greatest thing it might be permitted a 
mother to do in her distress w^ould be, if her little tribu- 
tury king were young enough, to bring down and offer 
him the usual tribute and exchequer bills, instead of this 
extraordinary war-tax ; i. e. to grant him a different, in- 
stead of the required gift. But, heavens ! has one then 
never seen how happy a child is who knows no orders, 
and consequently no foreign stubbornness, — who skips 
away as laughingly after a no as after a yes, — who by 
no changing arbitrariness between permission and re- 



SCREAMING AND CKYING OF CHILDREN. I2i 

straint, between yes and no, to which a victorious 
screaming fit always leads in the end, has not yet made 
the first bitter exjierience of injustice ; and who conse- 
quently receives no other nor deeper wounds than those 
which can strike the body? Mothers, have you never 
yet seen this happy child ? Try it, for an experiment, in 
one point ; for instance, strictly forbid your child of about 
two years and three quarters old ever to touch your 
watch (though rather a breast than an ear pendant), 
even if the watch lie openly every day on your work- 
table, and only act thus three days together, so as never 
to contradict yourself, — you will curse your former " for- 
feit-moneys." 

§70. 
Against the fourth kind of crying, — about loss, from 
fear, from vexation, — the imposition of some occupation 
is useful. Or thus ; you earnestly demand the child's at- 
tention, and begin a long speech; it is quite indifferent 
where it at last ends ; it is sufficient that the child has 
exerted himself and forgotten his misfortune. The thun- 
der-spark of a harsh word is very good, — " Quiet ! " fo;' 
instance. Never let the mind's green and yellow sick- 
ness, — ill-temper, — spread over the whole being. Hence 
it is very important, especially with little children, never 
to wait for the full outbreak of ill-humor, but at once to 
mark and repress its first smallest indication. For the 
rest, never put to flight naughtinesses which die away 
with years by those which grow with years: the tears 
of childhood dry up before the sighs of manhood com- 
mence. 



1^2 LEV AN A. 



CHATTER IX. 



ON THE TRUSTFULNESS OF CHILDREN. 
§71. 

LONG before the child can speak he understands 
the speech of others, and that without gestures or 
caderx3 in the voice : just as we understand a foreign 
Jiinguage without being able to speak it. It is for this 
reason that this chapter is placed here. 

One need but lend nearer objects to the child's faitt 
(Jides implicitd) of the elder theologians, and the word 
becomes important and true. If the child have in his 
own father a holy father, with all the advantages of infal- 
libility, and with the additional protection of a holy 
mother, — if, retaining the discourse of a stranger at once 
with belief and unbelief, he bring it to his parents, and 
ask. Is it true? — if to him, according to the primary 
propositions of the Wolfian philosophy, the father be the 
proposition of the sure foundation, the mother the propo- 
sition of doubt, and the teacher the proposition of the un- 
distinguishable ; — if he, believing without proof, set a 
pair of human beings against the whole outer world, and 
equal to his own inner world; if, when threatened, he 
rely with no more confidence on the bodily strength of 
the parental arms than on their spiritual power ; — if all 
this be so, it reveals a treasure of humanity, which, to 
value according to its worth, we need but to find and 
behold in older hearts. What, then, rests on this yet un- 
measured faith in men ? In the intellectual world, nearly 
everything ; and in the moral world, at least as much. 

The intellectual world, it is true, will be least ready to 



CHILDREN'S TRUSTFULNESS. 123 

grant this of itself. But what do we know of anj) island 
whatever which a voyager discovers, more than our foith 
in him o-ives? Or what of whole continents? A rough 
seafarer by his testimony governs a geographic continent 
in the learned world. If you oppose to me the multitude 
of witnesses, — although few distant countries have as 
many witnesses as a testamentary document, — I answer, 
Even out of the multitude of witnesses, no weight of 
probabihty would ensue, if the great faith in one indi- 
vidual were not strengthened by the multiplication of in- 
dividuals. Man believes man more readily about the 
distant and the vast — about former centuries and quar- 
ters of the globe — than about what is near and small ; 
and he does not permit in a stranger the probability of a 
lie to increase with the facility and impunity of uttering 
it, but with the very reverse. 

Thus we glean our Roman and Grecian history chiefly 
from their own testimony, — for we ourselves contradict 
the Persians who contradict Herodotus, — and we do not 
make half the difficulty about the collateral testimony of 
a thousand other witnesses (for no historian ever experi- 
enced all that he calls to life and describes), concerning a 
succession of a million actions, which lawyers do about 
one single matter of fact for which they require two wit- 
nesses. What gives us this certainty ? Faith in human- 
ity, and so in men, and consequently in one individual. 

So, further, the sciences of medicine, of astronomy, 
natural history, chemistry, are built up sooner and more 
extensively on others' experience than on our own : con- 
sequently on faith. Even our convictions from philo- 
sophical calculations call in trust in others, to aid the 
probability that we have not miscalculated. And where- 
fore does an irresi>ti!)]e longing impel us so strongly t* 



124 LEVAXA. 

the opinions of great men about ilie fonndatlons of our 
being, about God and our own souls, but because we be- 
lieve tlieir assurances more than the proofs of othevs and 
of ourselves ? And how does not intoxicated youth hang, 
— like bees on flowering lime-trees, — drinking in the 
spirit of a celebrated teacher ! 

But this faith reveals most richly its glorious form 
when its object is moral. Here the heart is refreshed by 
true bliss-imparting faith. In the intellectual world one 
trusts to what you say, — in the moral, to what you are. 
As lovers trust each other, as the friend trusts the friend, 
and the noble heart trusts humanity, and the faithful 
trust God, — this is the Peter's rock, the fast foundation 
of human worth. Alexander, who drank the suspicious 
medicine, was greater than the physician who made it 
healing instead of poisonous ; it is nobler to exercise a 
dangerous confidence than to deserve it: but wherein 
consists the divinity of this trustfulness?.. Not by any 
means merely in this, — that you cannot presuppose any 
power of vital danger in another, "without knowing and 
possessing it actively in yourself, — for you may both 
know and possess it, and yet not presuppose it ; and then 
in dangers, as in the case of Alexander, the trustful only 
is endangered, not the trusted. But herein consists the 
triumiDhal banner of faith in humanity, and the civic 
crown of heaven ; that the trusting must forbear and re- 
main quiet, — which, as in \var, so in everything el-e, is 
more difficult than to do and struggle, — and that faith, 
although the matter in hand be but a single 9ase, yet 
beholds and embraces all cases, a whole life. He who 
rightly trusts shows that he has seen the moral deity face 
to face ; and there is, perhaps, no higher moral gratifica- 
tion on earth than this, — if sense and testimony attack 



CniLDKEN'S TPwUSTFULNESS. 125 

the friend in your heart to hurl him thence, even then to 
stand by him with the God in you, to preserve and to 
love him, not as formerly, but more deeply. 

Therefore, if this trustfulness be the holy spirit in man, 
a lie is the sin against that spirit ; since we place another's 
word so high — even above our own — that, according to 
Pascal, a man to whom any sin was ascribed would at last 
believe and realize it. Plainer maintains that the weaker 
the brain, the more readily it believes, as is seen in drunken 
persons, sickly women, and children : but the question 
here becomes whether this (merely physical) weakness, 
which affords room for so many tender developments of 
the heart, — for love, inspiration, religion, poetry, — does 
not prepare, though at the cost of the other powers, the 
true, pure loneliness of absolute dominion to the holiest of 
the perceptions, the perception of the holiness of others ? 
The English are more easy of belief than any other nation, 
but neither weaker nor weak : they hate a lie too much 
ever to presuppose it. 

§72. 

I return to the trustfulness of children. Nature has, as 
if figuratively, richly prepared them for reception : the 
bones of the ear are, according to Haller, the only ones 
wliich are as large in the child as in the grown-up man ; 
or, to use another simile, the veins of imbibition are, ac- 
cording to Darwin, the fuller the younger they are. Holily 
preserve childlike trust, without which there can be no edu- 
cation. Never forget that the little dark child looks up to 
you as to a lofty genius, an apostle full of revelations, whom 
he trusts altogether more absolutely than his equals, and 
that the lie of an apostle destroys a whole moral world. 
Wherefore never bury your infallibility by useless proofs, 



126 LEVANA. 

nor by confessions of error : the admission of }'our igno- 
rance comports better with you. Power and scepticism 
the child can sufficiently early, and not at your charges, 
polemically and protestantly exercise and strengthen on 
the declared opinions of strangers. 

Do not in the least degree support religion and morality 
by reasons : even the multitude of pillars darken and con- 
tract churches. Let the holy in yourself be directed (with- 
out lock and turnkey) to the holy in the child. Faith — 
like the innate morality, the patent of the nobility of 
humanity brought with it from heaven — opens the little 
heart to the great old heart. To injure this faith is to 
resemble Calvin, who banished music out of the churches: 
for faith is the echo of the heavenly music of the spheres. 

When, in your last hour, — think well of it, — all in the 
broken spirit fades and dies, poems, thoughts, strivings, 
rejoicings, even then the night-flower of faith still blooms 
on, and refreshes with its perfume in the last darkness.* 

* The first volume of the origuial German work ends here. 




APPENDIX TO THE THIRD FRAGMENT 

ON PHYSICAL EDUCATION. 

HE expression is, properly, false; for as the 
science of care of the body it would equally 
apply to beasts, strong men, and the aged ; the 
cook would be a Labonne, and the kitchen a 
magazine of school-books. Permit me here to insert 
some observations on attention to the bodies of children 
which I addressed to a newly-married man shortly be- 
fore his wife's confinement. (Some readers will not agree 
so theoretically with this letter as my three children, 
who, during the printing and distribution of the first edi- 
tion, were educated in accordance with it, practically did, 
by their flourishing condition.) 



You may freely inform your dear wife why I write now 
on this point instead of half a year later ; namely, because 
she is now still trustful, but will in time to come be as 
disobedient as possible. I have known the most intelli- 
gent women who have really assisted and followed up the 
wishes of their most intelligent husbands in regard to the 
physical care of their child until the second had not yet 
arrived ; but then, or at most when the fourth came, the 
dietetic kitchen-Latin and medicinal patois of the women 
assumed the government, and nothing more could be 
fi-ffected than one or two propositions without results. 



128 LEVANA. 

A woman during her first pregnai cy might easily com- 
mit to memory Hufeland's " Good Advice to Mothers," 
since in the new edition there would be but three and a 
half pages to be learned monthly. 

Bi^ Heaven preserve every one from that timid over- 
carefulness which mistrusts nature, and has every child's 
tooth extracted by the physician or apothecary. If one 
ventures nothing upon children, yet one ventures them- 
selves; their bodies probably, their minds certainly. Only 
let a person observe the rosy children in lonely villages, 
where the whole Brownonian apothecary's-shop has noth- 
ing in its phials save brandy ; or the descendants of sav- 
ages compared with the fading Flora of noble houses, for 
which every-day draughts of every possible kind are com- 
pounded. 

However, nowhere is Hufeland's " Good Advice to 
Mothers" less attended to than in the huts of peasants 
and beggars. There one sees many little pale creatures 
looking out of the narrow windows when one goes out on 
sledging expeditions. But they bloom again with the 
earth ; the open air makes them rosy sooner than the sun 
does the apple. 

Hunters, savages, mountaineers, soldiers, all contend 
with all their powers for the advantages of fresh air ; all 
those who have lived to be a century and a half old were 
beggars ; and, in fact, if a man wishes to become nothing 
but old, and to continue nothing but healthy, there is no 
more wholesome, fresh-air-imbibing exercise than beg- 
ging ; nevertheless, mothers believe that a child, placed 
for half an hour at an open window, inhales out of a town 
which itself is but a larger room, and merely contains 
street air instead of house air, as much ethereal breath as 
is necessary to purify and cleanse twenty-three hours and 



PHYSICAL EDUCATION. I29 

a half of cavern air. Does no one remember, or no one 
remind her, with all her dread of air, that during the mis- 
erable autumn weather she travelled, on account of the 
war, three days long, with her infant baby in an open ve- 
hicle, through the pure, fresh air, without any other par- 
ticular injury than that of being brought here ? Could no 
chemist, by visible representations of the different kinds 
of poisonous air, impart to the mothers in towns a sense 
of the value of heaven's free air, in order to break them 
of their carelessness about the only invisible and ever- 
active element ? 

Why do you write, " I fear nothing so much as the 
procuring of a wet-nurse ? " Two of my children, pre- 
cisely the strongest, were brought up without the breast. 
But if a nurse is commonly healthy, and has not much 
less given her to do, nor much more to eat, than during 
her necessitous solitude, she may any day enter your ser- 
vice. Certainly I do not offer myself as security against 
any mental poisoning by her morals and care, any more 
than I do for all women servants, from the midwife down- 
wards ; an honest old, but good-tempered man-servant, 
your John, for instance, would be much better for a child's 
heart than any nurse and child's maid : just as at a later 
pei'iod, for the same reason, children are more spoiled and 
enervated in the friendly, praising, indulgent society ox* 
woiniMi, than in the cold, dry company of men. As re- 
gards the physical empoisonment of the milk by mental 
excitement, I should prefer the nurse to the lady. One 
often sees a common mother, as a bombarding ship, or 
bomb-shell, foster that kind of conversation with another 
woman, which is the only one in this world that has never 
grown wearisome, and which men call wrangling and abus- 
ing; but the suckling has observed or crie^l litlle abou» it 
6* I 



I20 LEV AN A. 

frequently, in private, the whole education of childish 
humanity is only made into the nurse of physical pro- 
gress ; as (if the expression may be allowed) men use 
the holy breath of life to turn the sails of windmills, and 
the next world as a swimming bladder on our earth ? 
Bad enough ! Every unholy thing sets before itself (and 
others) a period from which it will first begin to contem- 
plate the eternity of the Holy ; as if humanity were 
attached to some future year, the twentieth, thirtieth, 
sixtieth, instead of to every present moment. Where, 
and in what age and place, will the fear of hurting life 
by the strict consistency of education be overcome ? 
Think always only of the best ; the good will soon ap- 
pear. 

§69. 

The third kind of crying is that used to get something. 
Here hold fast Rousseau's advice, — Never let the child 
obtain an inch of ground by this war-cry ; only the mis- 
fortune is, w^omen are never to be moved to this patient 
indifference towards screaming. But they say to him, 
" No, you shall have nothing while you are so naughty ; 
but, when you have done crying, you shall see what I 
■will give you." And does the little despot want anything 
more ? The greatest thing it might be permitted a 
mother to do in her distress would be, if her little tribu- 
tury king were young enough, to bring down and offer 
him the usual tribute and exchequer bills, instead of this 
extraordinary war-tax ; i. e. to grant him a different, in- 
stead of the required gift. But, heavens ! has one then 
never seen how happy a child is who knows no orders, 
and consequently no foreign stubbornness, — who skips 
away as laughingly after a no as after a yes, — who by 
no changing arbitrariness between permission and re- 



SCREAMING AND CRYING OF CHILDREN. I2i 

straint, between yes and no, to which a victorious 
screaming fit always leads in the end, has not yet made 
the first bitter experience of" injustice ; and who conse- 
quently receives no other nor deeper wounds than those 
which can strike the body? Mothers, have you never 
yet seen this happy child ? Try it, for an experiment, in 
one point ; for instance, strictly forbid your child of about 
two years and three quarters old ever to touch your 
watch (though rather a breast than an ear pendant), 
even if the watch lie openly every day on your work- 
table, and only act thus three days together, so as never 
to contradict yourself, — you will curse your former " for- 
feit-moneys." 

§70. 
Against the fourth kind of crying, — about loss, from 
fear, from vexation, — the imposition of some occupation 
is useful. Or thus ; you earnestly demand the child's at- 
tention, and begin a long speech; it is quite indifferent 
where it at last ends ; it is sufficient that the child has 
exerted himself and forgotten his misfortune. The thun- 
der-spark of a harsh word is very good, — " Quiet ! " fo;* 
instance. Never let the mind's green and yellow sick- 
ness, — ill-temper, — spread over the whole being. Hence 
it is very important, especially with little children, never 
to wait for the full outbreak of ill-humor, but at once to 
mark and repress its first smallest indication. For the 
rest, never put to flight naughtinesses which die away 
with years by those which grow with years: the tears 
of childhood dry up before the sighs of manhood com- 
mence. 



92 LEVANA. 



C HATTER IX. 



L 



ON THE TRUSTFULNESS OF CHILDREN. 
§71. 

ONG before the child can speak lie understands 
the speech of others, and that without gestures or 
caderoB in the voice : just as we understand a foreign 
language without being able to speak it. It is for this 
reason that this chapter is placed here. 

One need but lend nearer objects to the child's faith 
(Jides impUcltd) of the elder theologians, and the word 
becomes important and true. If the child have in his 
own father a holy father, with all the advantages of infal- 
libility, and with the additional protection of a holy 
mother, — if, retaining the discourse of a stranger at once 
with belief and unbelief, he bring it to his parents, and 
ask, Is it true? — if to him, according to the primary 
propositions of the Wolfian philosophy, the father be the 
proposition of the sure foundation, the mother the propo- 
sition of doubt, and the teacher the proposition of the un- 
distinguishable ; — if he, believing without proof, set a 
pair of human beings against the whole outer world, and 
equal to his own inner world ; if, when threatened, he 
rely with no more confidence on the bodily strength of 
the parental arms than on their spiritual power ; — if all 
this be so, it reveals a treasure of humanity, which, to 
value according to its worth, we need but to find and 
behold in older hearts. What, then, rests on this yet un- 
measured faith in men ? In the intellectual world, nearly 
everything ; and in the moral world, at least as much. 

The intellectual world, it is true, will be least ready to 



CniLDREX'S TRUSTFULNESS. 123 

grant this of itself. But what do we know of any island 
whatever which a voyager discovers, more than our faith 
in him gives ? Or what of whole continents ? A rough 
seafarer by his testimony governs a geographic continent 
in the learned world. If you oppose to me the multitude 
of witnesses, — although few distant countries have as 
many witnesses as a testamentary document, — I answer, 
Even out of the multitude of witnesses, no weight of 
probabihty would ensue, if the great faith in one indi- 
vidual were not strengthened by the multiplication of in- 
dividuals. Man believes man more readily about the 
distant and the vast — about former centuries and quar- 
ters of the globe — than about what is near and small ; 
and he does not permit in a stranger the probability of a 
lie to increase with the facility and impunity of uttering 
it, but with the very reverse. 

Thus we glean our Roman and Grecian history chiefly 
from their own testimony, — for we ourselves contradict 
the Persians who contradict Herodotus, — and we do not 
make half the difficulty about the collateral testimony of 
a thousand other witnesses (for no historian ever experi- 
enced all that he calls to life and describes), concerning a 
succession of a million actions, which lawyers do about 
one single matter of fact for which they require two wit- 
nesses. What gives us this certainty ? Faith in human- 
ity, and so in men, and consequently in one individual. 

So, further, the sciences of medicine, of astronomy, 
natural history, chemistry, are built up sooner and more 
extensively on others' experience than on our own : con- 
sequently on faith. Even our convictions from philo- 
sophical calculations call in trust in others, to aid the 
probability that we have not miscalculated. And where- 
fore does an irresistible longing impel us so strongly t<f 



124 LEVANA. 

the opinions of great men about llie foundations of our 
being, about God and our own souls, but because we be- 
lieve their assurances more than the proofs of othevs and 
of ourselves ? And how does not intoxicated youth hang, 
— like bees on flowering lime-trees, — drinking m the 
spirit of a celebrated teacher ! 

But this faith reveals most richly its glorious form 
when its object is moral. Here the heart is refreshed by 
true bliss-imparting faith. In the intellectual world one 
trusts to what you say, — in the moral, to what you are. 
As lovers trust each other, as the friend trusts the friend, 
and the noble heart trusts humanity, and the faithful 
trust God, — this is the Peter's rock, the fast foundation 
of human worth. Alexander, who drank the suspicious 
medicine, was greater than the physician Avho made it 
healing instead of poisonous ; it is nobler to exercise a 
dangerous confidence than to deserve it: but wherein 
consists the divinity of this trustfulness ? .. Not by any 
means merely in this, — that you cannot presuppose any 
power of vital danger in another, 'without knowing and 
possessing it actively in yourself, — for you may both 
know and possess it, and yet not presuppose it ; and then 
in dangers, as in the case of Alexander, the trustful only 
is endangered, not the trusted. But herein consists the 
triumphal banner of faith in humanity, and the civic 
crown of heaven ; that the trusting must forbear and re- 
main quiet, — wdiich, as in war, so in everything el-e, is 
more difficult than to do and struggle, — and that faith, 
although the matter in hand be but a single ^ase, yet 
beholds and embraces all cases, a whole life. He who 
rightly trusts shows that he has seen the moral deity face 
to face ; and there is, perhaps, no higher moral gratifica- 
tion on earth than this, — if sense and testimony attack 



CHILDREN'S TEUSTFULNESS. I25 

the friend in your heart to hurl him thence, even then to 
stand by him with the God in you, to preserve and to 
love him, not as formerly, but more deeply. 

Therefore, if this trustfulness be the holy spirit In man, 
a lie is the sin against that spirit ; since we place another's 
word so high — even above our own — that, according to 
Pascal, a man to whom any sin was ascribed would at last 
believe and realize it Platner maintains that the weaker 
the brain, the more readily it believes, as is seen in drunken 
persons, sickly women, and children : but the question 
here becomes whether this (merely physical) weakness, 
which affords room for so many tender developments of 
the heart, — for love, inspiration, religion, poetry, — does 
not prepare, though at the cost of the other powers, the 
true, pure loneliness of absolute dominion to the holiest of 
the perceptions, the perception of the holiness of others ? 
The English are more easy of belief than any other nation, 
but neither weaker nor weak : they hate a lie too much 
ever to presuppose it. 

§ 72. 

I return to the trustfulness of children. Nature has, as 
if figuratively, richly prepared them for reception : the 
bones of the ear are, according to Haller, the only ones 
which are as large m the child as in the grown-up man ; 
or, to use another simile, the veins of imbibition are, ac- 
cording to Darwin, the fuller the younger they are. Holily 
preserve childlike trust, without which there can be no edu- 
cation. Never forget that the little dark child looks up to 
you as to a lofty genius, an apostle full of revelations, whom 
he trusts altogether more absolutely than his equals, and 
that the lie of an apostle destroys a whole moral world. 
Wherefore never bury your infallibility by useless proofs, 



126 LEVANA. 

nor by confessions of error : the admission of }"our igno- 
rance comports better with you. Power and scepticism 
the child can sufficiently early, and not at your charges, 
polemically and protestantly exercise and strengthen on 
the declared opinions of strangers. 

Do not in the least degree support religion and morality 
by reasons : even the multitude of pillars darken and con- 
tract churches. Let the holy in yourself be directed (with- 
out lock and turnkey) to the holy in the child. Faith — 
like the innate morality, the patent of the nobility of 
humanity brought with it from heaven — opens the little 
heart to the great old heart. To injure this faith is to 
resemble Calvin, who banished music out of the churches : 
for faith is the echo of the heavenly music of the spheres. 

When, in your last hour, — think well of it, — all in the 
broken spirit fades and dies, poems, thoughts, strivings, 
rejoicings, even then the night-flower of faith still blooms 
on, and refreshes with its perfume in the last darkness.* 

* The first volume of the oriffhial German work ends here. 



APPENDIX TO THE THIRD FRAGMENT 



ON PHYSICAL EDUCATION. 




HE expression is, properly, false; for as the 
science of care of the body it would equally 
apply to beasts, strong men, and the aged ; the 
cook would be a Labonne, and the kitchen a 
magazine of school-books. Permit me here to insert 
some observations on attention to the bodies of children 
which I addressed to a newly-married man shortly be- 
fore his wife's confinement. (Some readers will not agree 
so theoretically with this letter as my three children, 
who, during the printing and distribution of the first edi- 
tion, were educated in accordance with it, practically did, 
by their flourishing condition.) 



You may freely inform your dear wife why I write now 
on this point instead of half a year later ; namely, because 
she is now still trustful, but will in time to come be as 
disobedient as possible. I have known the most intelli- 
gent women who have really assisted and followed up the 
wishes of their most intelligent husbands in regard to the 
physical care of their child until the second had not yet 
arrived ; but then, or at most when the fourth came, the 
dietetic kitchen-Latin and medicinal patois of the women 
assumed the government, and nothing more could be 
effected than one or two propositions without results. 



128 LEVANA. 

A woman during her first pregnai cy might easily com- 
mit to memory Hufeland's " Good Advice to Mothers," 
since in the new edition there would be but three and a 
half pages to be learned monthly. 

Bi^t Heaven preserve every one from that timid over- 
carefulness which mistrusts nature, and has every child's 
tooth extracted by the physician or apothecary. If one 
ventures nothing upon children, yet one ventures them- 
selves; their bodies probably, their minds certainly. Only 
let a person observe the rosy children in lonely villages, 
where the whole Brownonian apothecary's-shop has noth- 
ing in its phials save brandy ; or the descendants of sav- 
ages compared with the fading Flora of noble houses, for 
which every-day draughts of every possible kind are com- 
pounded. 

However, nowhere is Hufeland's " Good Advice to 
Mothers" less attended to than in the huts of peasants 
and beggars. There one sees many little pale creatures 
looking out of the narrow windows when one goes out on 
sledging expeditions. But they bloom again with the 
earth ; the open air makes them rosy sooner than the sun 
does the apple. 

Hunters, savages, mountaineers, soldiers, all contend 
with all their powers for the advantages of fresh air ; all 
those who have lived to be a century and a half old were 
beggars ; and, in fact, if a man wishes to become nothing 
but old, and to continue nothing but healthy, there is no 
more wholesome, fresh-air-imbibing exercise than beg- 
ging ; nevertheless, mothers believe that a child, placed 
for half an hour at an open window, inhales out of a town 
which itself is but a larger room, and merely contains 
street air instead of house air, as much ethereal breath as 
is necessary to purify and cleanse twenty-three hours and 



PHYSICAL EDUCATION. 129 

a half of cavern air. Does no one remember, or no one 
remind her, with all her dread of air, that during the mis- 
erable autumn weather she travelled, on account of the 
war, three days long, with her infant baby in an open ve- 
hicle, through the pure, fresh air, without any other par- 
ticular injury than that of being brought here ? Could no 
chemist, by visible representations of the different kinds 
of poisonous air, impart to the mothers in towns a sense 
of the value of heaven's free air, in order to break them 
of their carelessness about the only invisible and ever- 
active element? 

Why do you write, " I fear nothing so much as the 
procuring of a wet-nurse ? " Two of my children, pre- 
cisely the strongest, were brought up without the breast. 
But if a nurse is commonly healthy, and has not much 
less given her to do, nor much more to eat, than during 
her necessitous solitude, she may any day enter your ser- 
vice. Certainly I do not offer myself as security against 
any mental poisoning by her morals and care, any more 
than I do for all women servants, from the midwife down- 
wards ; an honest old, but good-tempered man-servant, 
your John, for instance, would be much better for a child's 
heart than any nurse and child's maid : just as at a later 
period, for the same reason, children are more spoiled and 
enervated in the friendly, praising, indulgent society of 
women, than in the cold, dry company of men. As re- 
gai'ds the physical empoisonment of the milk by mental 
excitement, I should prefer the nurse to the lady. One 
often sees a common mother, as a bombarding ship, or 
bomb-shell, foster that kind of conversation with another 
woman, which is the only one in this world that has never 
grown wearisome, and which men call wrangling and abus- 
ing; but the suckling has observed or crie^l little abou* \t 
6* I 



IjO LEVANA. 

On the contrary, a lady, Avhom a false stitcli of her maid, 
like the sting of a tarantula, sets into an armed dance, 
may poison it three or four times a day. What concerns, 
another mental poison-draught for the child I utterly deny. 
If, as I believe I am able to prove, no partial transmigra- 
tion of soul from the mother into the new-born child is 
possible, how much less can mind influence mind by means 
of a nourishment which first affects the stomach ! One 
might just as well believe, with the Caribbees, that pork 
produces small eyes ; or with the Brazilians, that the flesh 
of ducks imparts the lazy, awkward pace of a duck. On 
this principle, goat's milk, and perhaps most nurses' milk, 
would have the same effect as that of Jupiter's nurse, 
which so completely transformed the god that he may be 
employed as anything rather than an example of many 
of the ten commandments. Bechsteiu, it is true, remarks 
that otters may be tamed by human milk ; but one may 
find a much nearer, and truer cause in the circumstances 
which such a milk diet presupposes. 

Much contention may take place about the relation of 
the mother's milk to the child's body. If a healthy 
stomach, like death, makes all ahke, potatoes, bread, 
venison steaks, ship-biscuits, ale, insects (crabs), worms 
(snails), and, finally, human flesh, into the same chyle, 
will not the stomach of a child be able to reduce its 
nurse's milk to the same substance ? And does not the 
child's body, in all its organic peculiarities, as frequently 
resemble its father as its mother ? Why, if the milk (in- 
stead of organization) effects so much, are not most of the 
nobility giants, since peasants' milk is often added to aris- 
tocratic blood as wine to water ? Indeed, on the ground 
of the influence of maternal relationship, there would be 
more to determine for than against, a nurse. The body 



PHYSICAL EDUCATION. 131 

ceaselessly polarizes itself; consequently the nitrogen, for 
instance, of the nurse would counterbalance the oxygen of 
the lady; and, on the other side, a town lady would be the 
best official nurse of a peasant boy. A cosmopolite tutor, 
and diet master, might go still further, and, in order all- 
sidedly to exercise and train a swaddled child, — mummies 
are swaddled corpses, and helmsmen swaddled men, — 
insist on its having one day ass's milk (the positive pole, 
thesis), the next, dog's milk (the negative pole, antithesis), 
the day after human milk (indifference, synthesis). 

As early as possible determine the hours of eating, and 
consequently the times for sleep ; only observing, that in 
the first years the intervals must be more frequent and 
shorter than afterwards. 

The stomach is such a creature of habit, such a time- 
keeper, that if, when hungry, we delay its usual period of 
gratification for a few hours, it does nothing but reject 
food. But if its hours of compulsory service are appointed, 
it works beyond its powders. It is only in later years, 
when the sketch and colors of the little man are more 
strongly marked, that middle tints and half shadows may 
be ventured on ; a child, like a savage, is often freed, often 
made a slave, by sleep and eating ; the physical nature is 
then either exercised or vanquished, and the spiritual is 
crowned in both cases. 

Do not keep the tumult of daily life fiir distant from 
the little infant, as though it were an aristocratic patient. 
If you do not actually permit the fire-bell or the discharge 
of artillery to be heard by its cradle, its long, deep slum- 
ber in the world will so harden it against every noise, 
that afterwards, when its ears are quicker, it wnll yet be 
able to sleep in the midst of noise ; and what is still 
better, and prevents injurious night-feeding, it will only 



132 LEVANA. 

sleep all the sounder in the contrasting stillness of night 
I earnestly contend against suckling in the niglit ; for 
your wife ought to sleep ; and it is quite sufficient if she 
suckle her little darling shortly before going to sleep, and 
tlien again immediately after wakening. It is a trifle, 
but so is a line ; why may I not give one to the other ? 
I mean, why do you lay the head of a new-born child 
lu'gher than its body ? In llie months preceding birth 
the body actually stood on the head ; I should think that 
a horizontal direction after a perpendicular was quite suf- 
ficient ; wherefore, then, create a new want, or prevent 
the subsequent use of a medicine, which the higher placing 
of the head is to children in case of colds, by employing 
it before it is needed? 

With regard to animal food, most people say, Wait till 
there are teeth to bite it. Why ? toothless children take, 
with advantageous effects, broths, and the strongest honey- 
thick extract of meat that I know, the yolk of egg^. 
Even flesh-meat is less to be objected to on account of 
its size, since it may be cut quite as small as it can be 
chewed, than on account of its being swallowed without 
chewing, that is, without saliva. But children enjoy and 
digest milk and broth almost entirely without previous gas- 
tric juice, the saliva, as birds of prey do pieces of flesh. 
Probably large pieces are chiefly injurious because we 
take more of them, and quicker, than little ones, in the 
same time ; for the stomach reckons satiety — in hunger 
as in thirst — not according to quantity (for a pint of 
water will frequently not quench the thirst as well as 
a slice of lemon) but according to organic assimilation : 
hence of no kind of food does one more easily eat so 
much too much as of what is indigestible ; because the 
difficult and more tardy assimilation delays and conceals 



PHYSICAL EDUCATION. I33 

the feeling of satiety. Wheat digestion is, no physiologist 
has hitherto been able to explain. The gastric juice, 
which is said to excite or produce hunger, (is there any 
thirst-juice, for thirst?) with its few spoonfuls, is not 
sufficient — when diluted and surrounded by a bottle of 
wine and a plate of soup, as a grain of arsenic by oil — 
to dissolve a Styrian cock's comb, not to mention an early 
meal, or even a late one. The gentle animal warmth 
which, as August is the wine-cook, ought to be the 
cooking-wine of food, is cooled and deluged by cold 
liquids with less of disadvantage than advantage to the 
digestion. If the stomach of men, as their nature in 
general, works as an ellipse, with two foci, and so not 
merely as a membranaceous vulture-stomach, but also as 
a fleshy poultry-stomach, and, along with chemical, pos- 
sesses also mechanical force, I do not understand how 
a pressure — that, for instance, of meat-broth or of gruel 
— assists it in digestion. 

But M-e are concerned with the thing itself, not with its 
explanation. Flesh-meat seems especially useful to coun- 
teract the weakness of childhood and the superabundance 
of sour food ; since even the young of granivorous birds 
are fed advantageously with eggs, worms, and insects. 
A sligliL and rare surfeit will exercise and strengthen the 
stomach's power of endurance : only do not let the beast 
of burden be overloaded with easily injurious substances, 
such as eggs or meat, but with things of moderately long 
duration, such as pulse or potatoes. 

Why do not people give children, at times when they 
will not take their food, sugar, (as distinct from confec- 
tions as food from poison,) on whose nourishing substan 3e 
the negro feeds himself and his horse during journeys of 
days together?^ 



134 LEVANA. 

Dufing the earliest years, — I was about to commence 
so again, but without any reason, — for the strict ordering 
of life only comprehends a period sufficiently long to 
raise and fasten the scaffolding of life. But as the dan- 
ger of death diminishes every day, — it is well known to 
be greatest at first, — growing freedom and powerful 
many-sidedness must arm the child against all the two 
and thirty winds and storms of life. 

Tea and coffee, as well as cakes and fruit, are generally 
given much more willingly and abundantly to children 
than wholesome wine as a tonic, and wholesome hopped 
beer as a drink ; whereas it were much better not to 
give the two liquids at all, cakes very seldom, and fruit 
abundantly only in hot seasons. By all means give them 
wine (but not any old, Spanish, or Hungarian), not out 
of a punch-ladle, but out of a teaspoon, and more fre- 
quently than abundantly, and every year less, and in the 
season of manly strength and vigor none at all. Bitter 
beer, at a proper distance from two meals, is at once 
excitement and nourishment. Afterwards, in the eighth 
and tenth years, water must be the drink, and beer the 
tonic. I would not merely allow girls to drink beer 
longer than boys, but always ; unless the mothers, like 
true Lycurguses, forbid growing fat. Thank God, my 
friend, in the name of your posterity, that you, like 
myself, do not live in Saxony, or in the Saxon Voigt- 
land, but in Baireuth, near the best beer, — the cham- 
pagne-beer. "^ 

White beer, without hops, is a slimy poison for chil- 
dren ; and unhopped brown beer not much better. Those 
who are too fat should only take it in water, as the 
Greeks did wine. In the early ages of Germany, before 
tea, coffee, and foreign wine ruled and weakened, fourfold 



PHYSICAL EDUCATION. 135 

stronger beer was brewed ; then people did not dig the 
bones of giants out of the earth, but frequently consigned 
them to it ; whereas for us, under the government of 
concentrated tea and coffee poison, the only antidote, 
beer, is weakened. 

About one point, my friend, (forgive my following no 
other order than that of yourself and your wishes,) you 
will in future often grow hot or cold towards your gentle 
wife, at least I expect so, — and that is, actually about 
heat and cold. It is a well-known fact that more than 
one excellent author has much prolonged the continuance 
of the honeymoon, holding it to resemble the year-weeks 
of Daniel, and has only fixed its certain end after the 
birth of the first child ; concerning this, however, there 
has been much quarrelling : partly on the man's side 
with medical reasons, and partly on the woman's, with 
her own ; I mean this in case the child is healthy ; if it 
be sickly, perfect rage ensues. I once wrote a para- 
graph on this subject, in case I should ever experience 
the happiness of forming myself on my own principles 
of education. 

Since women, like a born parlor race, or household 
divinity, — we are merely sea, land, and air gods ; or, 
compared to those domesticated doves, kindly-meaning, 
but untamed wild pigeons, — love warmth as they do 
coffee, and so, besides covering, seek all manner of warm 
wraps, only far too many for one body ; and would rather 
have nine accumulated veils and shawls than one, though 
of the largest, and for that reason lay aside furs, how- 
ever warm and costly they are ; therefore it is that these 
mentally tropical beings willingly press their preferences 
and necessities on the beings they love best, — their 
children. But does not Nature herself, at birth, make the 



136 LEVANA. 

most marked change, when she casts it out of an organic 
bed, which she herself warmed, through the air, into 
a Ufeless one, for which the child must be the bed- 
warmer? To which is to be added the partial, and, 
moreover, injurious uncovering, that of the face and head, 
after the previous uniform warmth of the whole body. 
Hence the question might be mooted, whether the head 
of the new-born infant — - so hairless, so thin-skulled, and 
unclosed — does not need to be protected by warm cover- 
ings more, or at least as much, as the other members, if 
many men, among whom we, the whole congregated pos- 
terity of our ancestors, are to be reckoned, had not 
hitherto withstood it and are still alive : so richly does 
Nature gush forth in new springs, whether you close 
against her one or one hundred. In the mean time she 
receives the child after this transit from the hot zone of 
the earth into the cold one, with two invigorating pro- 
vocatives : with nourishment for the lungs and nourish- 
ment for the stomach, — two hitherto unemployed members. 
Well, then, let the mother imitate therein the universal 
mother, and not let the child fly from external cold, but 
conquer it by excitements to inward warmth. The best 
fiir-coat for children grows on wine mountains. Joy is 
the warm, sunny side of the mind and of the body. 
Exercise is the third non-conductor of frost. The new 
eulogists of warmth are only in the riglit when they are 
interrupted. In the cold air of a room a child would 
shrivel up like a plant on the top of a mountain ; but it 
would do the same in everlasting heat : the strongest men 
are not produced either in the immediate neighborhood 
of the equator or of the poles, but in the temperate 
zones, which alternate between frost and warmth, but 
with a [ireponderance of the latter. Do not let any 



PHYSICAL EDUCATION. 137 

{apartments for children be cold, with the exception of the 
sleeping-room ; for bed is of itself an external fur cov- 
ering, and sleep an internal one ; and what additional 
warmth is possible, in case of illness, if you have already 
more than reached the degree permitted ? If you allow 
your future Paul (if I may venture to choose his god- 
father before you) to go without shoes (which would be 
to you but a saving of leather, but to him of a whole 
funeral train of evils), or if you order your future Pau- 
Una (to whom he ^all, probably, with gentlemanly polite- 
ness, permit the first entrance into life, for most first 
children are females) to go without stockings, though 
soled or shoed, then, in every illness Avhere a warm foot- 
bath is advisable, you can give one of the longest duration 
simply by a pair of shoes and stockings. I had my 
reasons, friend, for recommending shoes, as though they 
were bridal shoes, to your Paulina, although, alas ! along 
with them all the corns, cold feet, thin, tender soles and 
heels, which a shoe includes. For I know from afar off 
the despair, the womanly dread, lest feet without shoes 
should really grow as large as nature intended, and so 
quite beyond the conventional size of a foot. Our Chi- 
nese Podolatry (foot-worship) more readily suffers the 
nakedness of the higher parts, for instance, of the bosom 
or of the back, than for a girl to go barefoot. Luckily — 
in this case — a boy is not a girl. So let him dance 
barefoot through this young world, like the ancient 
heroes, who are always represented with bare feet. If 
his foot grow into a pedestal, what signifies it to us two 
men, since we, and even rational women, inquire so little 
about it ? 

Why do mothers talk a hundred times about taking 
cold, and scarcely once about becoming overheated, which, 



138 LEVANA. 

especially in winter, so readily passes into fatal cold ? I 
shall answer this in a very unexpected way, w^hen I say, 
It is because winter lies nearest to their heart, and conse- 
quently most in their eyes. Winter is, in fact, the 
bleacher and fiiir colorer of their faces, and they approach 
the snow as a new whitening material ; hence summer is 
much too warm for them to uncover their necks and 
shoulders as they do in winter, which does not discolor 
them. Hence those tender chamber-covered nurslings, 
lily-white and lily-fragile, come from the north, and re- 
semble those w^iite blades of grass, w^hich may be found 
under stones in the midst of green spring. Certainly this 
dazzling winter-snow does not bear the fruits of the true 
blossom-snow, for which, nevertheless, W'e often mistake 
it, as we do beauty for strength.V 

A fortunate accident for daughters is the Grecian gar- 
ment-fashion of the present Gymnosophists (naked fe- 
male runners), which, it is true, injures the mothers, but 
hardens the daughters ; for as age and custom should 
avoid every fresh cold, so youth exercises itself on it, as 
on every hardship, until it can bear still greater. 

The Unalasks (hear it, ye enemies of every hardening 
process !) dip a crying child into the sea until it is quiet, 
it necessarily afterwards grows the stronger for it.* So, 
simile-wdse, the present naked manner of dressing is a 
cold bath into which the daughters are dipped, wiio 
usually grow cheerful in it. A physician should always 
invent the fashions ; since he cannot remove a new one 
except by something still newer. 

-A system of physical hardening is, indeed, mentally 
necessary, because the body is the anchor-ground of 
courage. Its aim and consequence is not so much health 
* See KanCs Phys. Geog. von Vullmci\ 3 B. 1st div. 



PHYSICAL EDUCATION. 139 

and prolongation of life, — for weakly and sensual per- 
sons often gi'ow old, and nuns and court ladies still of- 
tener, — as a fortification against weakness of character, 
and for cheerfulness and activity.\ As it is not a woman's, 
but only a man's, mind which becomes more womanish by 
effeminacy, it may easily happen in the higher ranks in 
which the men are, comparatively, more effeminate than 
the women, that the weak will surpass the weakened 
sex ; and men and women have the delightful prospect of 
resembling date-trees, of which the female only produces 
fruit, the male nothing but flowers. , 

The present fashion in dress, regarded as an air-bath 
establishment, might have its end more perfectly obtained 
among children, if the garments were occasionally entirely 
laid aside. I mean, why do not we give ourselves, but 
still more our children, the pleasure of playing naked half 
a day in the warm air and sunshine, like Adam in his 
paradise of innocence ? 

In ancient Germany, where our ancestors tasted the 
forbidden fruit later, and consequently hung the fig- 
leaves later round them, the children were permitted, as 
in Egypt, to remain ten years longer in nakedness : what 
spirits of physical power must not have stepped from 
their cold forests, when eighteen hundred years of warmth 
and luxury have not sufficed to make their descendants 
weaker than either of us two ! So the wood of stripped 
trees can bear a greater weight than that of those which 
retain their bark. 

/' One need but see how light, active, and refreshed an 
unclothed child feels, drinking and swimming through the 
air, moving its muscles and limbs freely, and ripening in 
the sun like a fruit from which the leaves have been 
removed. So many children's games are Olympic and 



140 LEVAXA. 

gymnastic, let the children, then, at least be Greeks, that 
is to sav, unclothed. 

The cold water bath maj be best used immediatelj 
after the air bath ; if, in other respects, it may be uncon- 
ditionally recommended to children under four years old. 
There is, however, one compensation for the bath ; that 
of a daily dipping of the whole body in cold water, 
though each limb be only wet in turns and quickly rubbed 
dry. I permitted this Anabaptist sin against Brown and 
his followers to be perpetrated eyerj- day upon my own 
children : the consequences were, not chilliness, colds, 
and weakness, but the yery reverse. Schwarz, in his 
treatise on education, regards the dislike of a child to this 
treatment as a hint from Nature ; but then the same rea- 
son would apply to many medicines, and also to the warm 
bath, which children struggle against in the first insUmce, 
because they feel all at once so many unaccustomed 
delights. 

If cold water have medicinal powers for the stomach, 
which evaporate when warmed, so has it also for the im- 
bibing skin. After air, cold and warm baths, sleep is 
beneficial. 

There is still one kind of bath, hitherto unused, which 
would be very advantageous, both to parents and chil- 
dren, — I mean a thunder-storm bath. Physicians employ 
in their experiments on nervous invalids, electric air, 
electric plates, electric baths ; but thunder, or rather 
thunder-water, they have not as yet prescribed. Have 
they never experienced that a person never feels so fresh, 
cheerful, and elastic as after a warm or tepid rain has 
penetrated to the skin ? Since human beings, when dry 
again after a storm, feel so much invigorated, and the 
world of fiowcrs still more so, why will tliey not receive 



PHYSICAL EDUCATION. 141 

this united fire and water baptism from above, and suffer 
themselves to be raised and healed by the "wonder-working 
arm in the thunder-cloud ? 

One ought to have an especial rain or bathing suit of 
clothes, as a frequenter of the spring cloud-baths ; and 
then, when there is promise of wet weather, make a rain 
part J, and return home dripping. 

The bath company must, alas ! change their clothes, — 
the only thing about it which does not please me. The 
shepherd-boy, even in the cold rainy days of November, 
takes no chest of clothes with him to the field ; neither 
does any French soldier who has marched himself warm 
all day in the rain, and lies down at night on the cold 
ground ; the fisher stands with his feet in the water and 
his head in the sun, precisely breaking and reversing the 
physician's rule ; — yet the only hundred-and-seventy 
year-old man in England was a fisher, and had previously 
been a soldier and a beggar ! Heavens ! with what a 
fair play-ground and free city of the body is our mind 
originally surrounded ! and how long must it have been 
the slave of sin and of opinion ere it was condemned to be 
the chained helmsman or ship-mover of the body ! 

Mental all-sidedness, which means all-powerfulness, is 
not granted us, but physical is ; now let childhood at least 
be formed for this, and the body, which can inhabit all 
countries, be exercised in accommodating itself to all ; as 
the Russian does, who imitates his own empire, a minia- 
ture Europe in climate, and endures by turns the hottest 
vapor, and the coldest snow baths, the extremes of hunger 
and of repletion. Is it not enough to be so pampered as 
to make a pillow of a snow-ball ? — and now at last we 
use a cloak -bag, or even a feather-bed ! 

I add to the above remarks, that parents in physical 



142 LEVANA 

matters — nla^ that it sliould happen in morals ! — oiiglit 
to require more from their children than from themselves : 
in accordance "with tliis, let the rain-wet clothes at ap- 
pointed times dry on the children. 

Would that every mother would consider that, as she 
opposes inoculation to natural small-pox, so, on the same 
grounds, she should oppose the blow of accidental, un- 
expected, and therefore unprepared-for danger, by the 
favorable hardening of versatile childhood, when the 
choice of the battle-field is so easy ! 

Our modern women might more readily imitate the 
ancient Germans in every point than in this ; of becom- 
ing ministers of the art of healing, and so the midwives 
of the future world. If I were a physician, or an impor- 
tant teacher in a girls' school, I should consider it my 
most useful work to prepare a medical '* Theory of 
Doubts " for women ; I would therein merely ask ques- 
tions, give a hundred answers to each, and then ask them 
to choose. I would, for instance, lay quite undecided be- 
fore them the theory of fever in all its infinite variety, 
yes, and even the thousand causes of headache, the inter- 
mixture of which so much increases it. AVhosoever, even 
in the cradle, gave attention to the science of medicine, — 
a science in which, more than in any other, genius and 
learning should form one indivisible compound being, — 
would be astonished at the boldness with which any no- 
doctor, and his wife into the bargain, pronounces on the 
parentage, name, and progeny of every illness. Good 
heavens ! my friend, women think they understand some- 
thing, we will say the very smallest part, of the most 
difficult of all applied sciences, that which is applied to 
the various mental and physical nature, united undistin- 
guishably in one organization ; whereas whole cities 



PHYSICAL EDUCATION. 143 

■would thank God if there "were to be had in each of them 
but one graduated man, universal doctor, medical coun- 
sellor, and first physician, who would assist you, less to 
heaven, than to your legs again ; and would not, as if he 
were a pope, regard every pilgrim on this earth as a pil- 
grim of the cross, whom he had to send forth to win a 
consecrated grave (if he deserved one). The best physi- 
cian is a prize in the lottery, the best medicine from him 
is a prize in the lottery. And yet every woman considers 
herself to be both lotto and lottery ; at once both the great 
prize, and that fifth in order. 

Whence comes this absurd petension to the art of heal- 
ing among women, — and let us include ourselves, — 
among other human beings, myself, for instance (whose 
whole letter proves it), and among men of former ages, as 
the old Latin proverb testifies,* and Eulenspiegel also, to 
whom every passer-by prescribed a cure for his tooth- 
ache ? This folly proceeds from a hundred causes ; for 
instance, from the confusion of the science of medicine, 
and the art of surgery ; from the differences among 
physicians ; from anxiety and afifection, &c., &c., — but I 
chiefly believe, from trust in the proposition of a sufficient 
reason. Man, a cause-seeking animal as well as one of 
mere habit, — however modestly he may listen to all sci- 
entific things, which end in history or mere information, 
to all histories of the world or of nature, to informatioil 
about measurement, coining, language, arms, antiquity, 
history, — this man cannot restrain his power and insight 
when any scientific theory is presented to him, whether it 
be of the subject in hand, of nature, of morals, of taste, of 
sickness. The peasant gives his opinion about the causes 

* Fingunt se medicos quivis idiota, sacerdos, JudaBus, monachus, 
histrio, rasor, anus. 



144 LEVANxV. 

of the world, of a tliiinder-storm, of sin, of a performance 
on the organ, of bodily pain ; for in all these cases he 
draws his theory entirely out of himself. 

If women particularly desire to cure something, I 
would propose to them besides souls, — for which they 
would be better soul-curesses than the soul-curers are, — 
wounds ; as in some Spanish provinces women remove 
the beard, so should they also legs and arms : their hands, 
so gentle, tender, and apt, their keener survey of what 
is actually before them, and their compassionate hearts 
would certainly as sweetly heal common wounds as they 
make those of the heart. Many a soldier, if the female 
surgeon of his regiment were pretty, would boldly expose 
himself to wounds, were it only to have them bound by 
her, or suffer his arm to be amputated by her in order to 
give her his hand. The blood-fearing eye of women 
would become sufficiently hardened, though not so flinty, 
as that of men ; as the Parisian fish-women prove by 
wounds and blows. Moreover, at this present time the 
whole world is forming hardening-schools for the feelings, 
— I mean wars. 

I will only add a page or two to my over-lengthy epis- 
tle, and then break off. Although every mother plays 
the doctor, she yet constantly requires one for the child. 
Then she wants very many remedies, in order to try each 
only once, and so, in consequence, not at the wrong time. 
Then she requires many doctors, in order to hear and to 
say much. And many even think to instigate the doctor 
to a more active campaign against the malady, by repre- 
senting it as worse than it is, and concealing the favorable 
symptoms: as if a person should try to rescue himself 
from the danger of drowning by screaming fire, or from 
fire by the distress signals in use at sea. 



PHYSICAL EDUCATION. 145 

Meanwhile, as no woman's mind will suffer itself to be 
deprived of a physicking finger along with the doctor's 
ring, nor of its brains as well as the doctor's hat, a man 
might, myself for instance, remove the chief danger of a 
domestic practice of a system of medicine for the family 
circle, by a few general rules, such, perhaps, as the follow- 
ing : — Grant, in general, for instance, that most illnesses 
are asthenic or weakening, — according to Brown, above 
eight ninths, to Schmidt the full nine ninths ; — now, the 
younger the children are the more asthenic are they, and 
so more likely to die from sudden loss of strength, than 
from sudden over-stimulants ; wherefore, in every case 
you may prescribe strengthening domestic remedies, that 
is to say, nourishment, a tonic of the least injurious kind. 
./ The heat of fever can only be allayed by what the 
child himself fancies ; and still less must it be strength- 
ened by medicines instead of nourishment ; and least of 
all by food instead of drink. A few words on this point 
may be allowed even to the laity ; the superior excellence 
of a glass of wine to all glasses of medicine in cases of 
weakness is seen in grown-up people, in whom, after all 
apothecary's essences, the electric spark of life has fre- 
quently been rekindled by one strengthening bottle of 
wine, — of this I have experienced strangely decisive in- 
stances. And many things might easily be added to this ; 
wine has the advantage of a longer, slower, and more 
constant influence ; w^hereas the tonics of the apothecary 
assume the name of aqua-vitae, and act like earthquakes, 
that is to say, by small doses and long intervals. 

I will give yet one other piece of good advice, the very 

best, to women ; that is, when a child is really ill, to do 

nothing whatever, — especially nothing new, — not to 

char e a moderate temperature, — to give him wliat he 

7 J 



146 LEVAXA. 

wishes to eat or drink, — to say nothing if he fast for a 
few (lays, — and to avoid all dome.-tic recipes. A mis- 
take in a domestic remedy, giving wine, for instance, 
instead of vinegar, or, in an opposite case, fruit instead 
of eggs, may just as easily be the cause of death as a 
mistalce in a p^escription^\ Tlie only thing I would 
further recommend to the mother is, Dr. Kihan's excel- 
lent " Home and Travelling Physician," — and tliat, not 
that she may attempt to cure by it, but that, after a 
physician has named the complaint, she may use a treat- 
ment in accordance with it. For the husband I should 
recommend Kilian's '' Clinical Handbook," a new edition 
of the former work, enlarged and enriched with receipts. 
Both books will be sent for your perusal by the next 
carrier. 

The gymnastic instruction of your Paul shall be dis- 
cussed another time, in some six or seven years, when he 
shall be born and have attained that age. In any case I 
would, at least, let my own children, for weeks together, 
climb, leap, swim, run races, play at ball and nine-pins ; 
but I would also just as soon, for wrecks together, let 
them dig like a burrowing mole, or be kept quiet like a 
person recovering from scarlet-fever ; and this, not that 
they become well, but may continue well ; and in a cen- 
tury given more to sitting than to speaking, may bring 
with them so much sitting faculty that they may not suf- 
fer penance on their bench every session. At least, I 
would exercise the strong in sitting as much as the weak 
in exercise. I would also rather set them to hard bodily 
labor in the evening than in the morning, and so cause 
physical exertion to follow, not precede, mental. Sitting 
and thinking after violent exercise is not nearly so healthy 
or agreeable as the reverse. Active exercise in the 



PHYSICAL EDUCATION. I47 

morning, as an excitement to the sluggish earlj pulse, 
along with the greater excitahilitj experienced at that 
time, will frequently exhaust for the whole day. The 
leaps which boys practise on their way from school show 
the bent of nature. In spite of all these reasons I would 
yet do the opposite, — not always, but yet occasionally, — 
in order to inure the body to it. \^ 

I wull now close my letter, which consists almost en- 
tirely of postscripts, because I constantly intended to con- 
clude, and always went on. Fare you well, and your 
wife still better. 

J. P. F. R. 

P. S. If you should have purchased Dr. MarschalPs 
" Instructions for the Care of Mothers, Children, &c., &c., 
in their peculiar Illnesses," third edition, two parts, — be 
somewhat mistrustful and disobedient wnth regard to his 
instructions ; or at least, let them be first filtered and re- 
fined by some Brownian physician. When, for instance, 
he orders a lying-in woman to have nothing during the 
first nine days but sour fruit, saltpetre, and other weak- 
ening diets, he does just the same as if one were to lay a 
person apparently frozen to death, who can only be re- 
covered by very gradual application of warmth, beginning 
at the lowest possible degree, in an ice-house for a few 
days in order that he might recover gradually from the 
cold. Certainly he would do so slowly enough; as he 
would scarcely become warm before the resurrection. 




COMIC APPENDIX AND EPILOGUE TO THE 
FIRST VOLUME. 




A DREAMED LETTER TO THE LATE PROFESSOR GELLERT, IN 
WHICH THE AUTHOR BEGS FOR A TUTOR. 

UFFER a dreamed letter to find its place here, 
for the recreation both of reader and writer. 
Few men have experienced so rational a kind 
of dreaming as I have done ; — whereof more 
shall be said at some future time in a revision of my 
treatises : others must treasure up their rational waking 
thoughts. I was obliged, when awake, to help out this 
dream, even with some changes in its order, so that it 
might — by the system of opposite ends and aims, as well 
as of memory and oblivion — really appear what it is. 
For the rest, I hope I paid it sufficient heed ; for, as soon 
as it was over, I employed the w^ell-known art of recall- 
ing dreams by shutting the eyes, and keeping every limb 
motionless. Unfortunately all the fancies or foundlhigs 
of a dream — the enfans perdus of the imagination, all 
the more truly because they usually carry us back to the 
days of our childhood, and so form a limhus infantum — 
have this great foult, that they shine brilliantly until we 
awake, but then little or nothing of them is to be found. 
At least such is my case ; and I hope the reader con- 
sents. 



COMIC APPENDIX AND EPILOGUE. I49 

" Excellent departed Gellert ! I want a tutor for my 
son Max ; for I am at present engaged in writing on 
education, and consequently have not a spare minute to 
devote to the practice of it ; just as Montesquieu found 
himself obliged to resign the office of president to devote 
himself to the ' Spirit of Laws.' Since, at every univer- 
sity there are pedagogic engrossers and purveyors, and 
fewer subjects of instruction than accomplished instruct- 
ors ; and since, moreover, you, before your decease, exer- 
cised the patron's right of appointing tutors, I did not 
know why you should not proceed in it still better now, 
not merely because you have marched forward with 
time, but also with eternity. In the extended acquaint- 
ance your immortal part must have formed on many 
planets, — (for as virtue in futurity is the reward of vir- 
tue, so also heavenly authorship will be the reward of 
earthly,) — you cannot fail to have ample choice of people, 
and candidates in our system. Only you must not pro- 
pose to me any tricked-out, spurred dweller in Leipsic, 
of your time, clothed throughout in beautifying cement; 
no, not even the late Gellert himself (except as far as re- 
gards his loving gentleness and naive cheerfulness), I 
want a very hard material, — mind. There are, unavoid- 
ably, so many born harlequins, shall we also make edu- 
cated ones, or both together ; stamped yellow pinchbeck 
pieces, crawling, cringing, worms ? 

" Heavens ! how is it that I always find something good 
in books on education, and so seldom anything of it in 
teachers ? What have I not seen of these last, Gellert, 
and yet may see in any town I please ? I do not (be- 
cause I will not) thinli of those peevish creatures full of 
child-hate, those living aversions to little ones, — for 
manly justice makes even a false system of education 



150 LEVANA. 

good ; and, to give an instance, nothing is so dangerous 
in icebergs as the clefts or chasms, — but of those sickly 
sweet, honey-dewed, sugar-of-lead perpetual teachers, who 
would consecrate everything for the young, even the 
swaddling-clothes, as a pope does those actually used. 
Oh ! I perfectly understand that tutor : after every step 
and every leap of the young creature he will sow some- 
thing; and, moreover, be most anxious to know whether 
the mental cherry-stones which he has brought him en- 
veloped in their sweet covering, will grow and take root 
in his stomach, as he hopes ; or, to use another different 
living metaphor of enjoyment, whether the frogs' eggs he 
has given him in a draught of pond water are developing 
themselves. In physical matters, says he, the same thing 
is commoner, but injurious, and then he shortly alludes to 
the lessons in which he also teaches it. 

" The tutor stands up for the U without which the 
child's Q cannot be pronounced. ' Let my sermon pre- 
cede every action,' says he ; ' the man, forsooth, must 
strengthen with many reasons every childish action of the 
child, and shave it with a scythe.' 

"He who has seen such a man frequently, though not 
everywhere, has learned much. In China there is a law- 
book, and interpreters of it too, to teach the best method 
of drinking tea genteelly. But the above-mentioned man 
would wish the thing to be done improperly, and properly 
also ; because, indeed, he finds a very great want of direc- 
tions for children how to take coffee, tea, tobacco, stones 
— for throwing ; hands — for kissing ; and cakes — tor 
stealing. It is the same man who chalks up the ten com- 
mandments on the study door, as on a pillar of remem- 
brance, so that the young may always have them before 
their eyes, — which is precisely the best mf aris of never 



COMIC APPENDIX AND EPILOGUE. 151 

seeing them. Most parental and tutoral commands re- 
semble tlie inscription one sees on some doors, — of ' Shut 
the door,' which cannot be read if he have left the door 
open. 

" Observe from above a tutor who chains himself to his 
prisoners ; who permits himself to be adopted as spiritual 
father ; which the real father ought to be, since we can 
indeed give instruction to a stranger's child, but education 
onlj to our own, because the one may know cessation, the 
other must proceed without interruption : observe him, and 
he must appear to you (even without the bird's-eye per- 
spective of another world) less in that serious light which 
is usual above, than in a very different one ; when, for 
instance, you see him take a walk with his auditory of 
slaves, endeavoring to turn every hill and stream and 
knot of people (in themselves nothing) into a medium of 
imparting instruction to his slaves. For as long as the 
child is awake he ceases not to develop him ; although, 
perhaps, his dreams develop him much better. If every 
Eastern pearl costs the life of a slave, every Western pupil 
costs a teacher, and something more. The teacher, who 
cannot live to himself, suffers his pupil as little life to 
himself ; and so they mutually impart to each other sins 
of weakness ; somewhat as the New and the Old World 
imparted to each other a new disease, — that of the double 
small-pox. 

" To speak in figures, departed friend, tutors and beg- 
gars mutilate childi-en in order to feed themselves ; only 
the former expose the distortions as curved lines of beauty, 
the latter as holes and chinks in their living alms'-boxes. 

" Or by their long polishing of the child they rub off its 
pure form ; like those glass dishes in which curious speci- 
mens of glass are so laboriously piled that at last their 
original depth is positively diminished. 



152 LEVAXA. 

" But should this be, excellent immortal ? Must my 
good Max, whose eye and hand aim at power, fall down 
so weakened and weary ? Must, in short, a boy of the 
nineteenth century be blown out by his tutor so thin and 
tender and brittle, that he — like the man recorded by 
Lusitanus, who thought his seat was made of glass, and 
therefore always remained on his legs — must regard 
everything about him as moral aesthetic, intellectual glass, 
and so not venture to sit, to stand, or to lie, — nay, not 
even to be ? As was said above, dear friend, I chose to 
say this in a somewhat figurative style, because I wished 
to tread in your footsteps. But, like all imitators, (I know 
that too well,) I must retire with a longer nose and not 
much shorter ears ; for your present figurative style (since 
in heaven or Uranus you are near the greatest objects and 
worlds, Jupiter and Hell, and have them to inspire you) 
must be totally different from any other, even your own 
mortal style ; from which doubtless it is distinguished by 
bold Oriental imagery ; and you will say, even Gellert, 
naturalized in heaven, writes in some degree more wittily 
and instructively, and no one there speaks dully. For the 
rest, I know perfectly well, even to your very phrases, the 
objections you will make to me against the influence of 
tutoral glazing. For you will find an anecdote which you 
have read in Marville,* applicable to the point. As an 
instance how accurately I can guess, I will myself relate 
it to you. ' A young gentleman, a preacher, w^ith fine 
action, voice, and so forth, mounted the pulpit and began 
his sermon ; but lo ! he had forgotten it, and knew even 
less than before what he had to say. However, he com- 
posed himself, raised his voice, (and himself too, as he 
hoped, by the action,) and proclaimed to his audience, 

* Melange d'llistoire de Vigneul-Marville. 



COMIC APPENDIX AND EPILOGUE. 153 

^ith rare energy, one conjunction after another, — enfin^ 
uir, done, si, or, — and muttered with falling voice all kind 
of inaudible matter between the particles. The poorer 
parishioners were excited, and in the highest degree atten- 
tive, yet without being able to understand much ; and so 
they, naturally and reasonably, attributed their not hear- 
ing to the distance of their sittings from the pulpit, which 
one part of the congregation supposed too far off, and the 
other too near. And so this soul-curer, with his connect- 
ing, passionate, and apostrophizing words, preached about 
three quarters of an hour, throwing himself and the pew- 
occupiers into a fever and perspiration ; then pronounced 
the Amen, and descended from the pulpit with the repu- 
tation of a true pulpit orator. The whole body of hearers 
resolved next time to choose their seats better ; some to 
sit nearer, some farther off, so as not to lose a syllable.' 

" Now what else do most teachers preach to children, 
and philosophers to the sons of the muses and their 
readers, than a few thousand sis, doncs, cars, without any 
rational word attached? 

" What else are most lessons to children — as most 
men's conversations to women — than customary marks 
to i)ay no attention? 

/" You now know what kind of a spiritual father I, the 
physical father, wish to adopt for my child. Naturally I 
only speak of the tutor's soul. His body may just as well 
be kneaded out of the earth of Uranus, Saturn, the moon 
or tlie sun, as out of the earth of this world. As to the 
soul, I wish that you would select such from among the 
candidates out of the present ten planets, as you did for- 
merly from those out of the ten German circles, — which 
circles, dear Gellert, since your removal, have almost un- 
dergone ten pf^rspcutions of tho Christians, and metamor- 
7* 



154 LEV ANA. 

piloses of Vishnu, — and then, ont of this selection from 
the })lanets, choose one for me. You will spare me a sub- 
ject out of the leaden, dull, and heavy, selfish Saturn ; 
who, with all his breadth of rings and abundance of 
moons, has wearisomely long years, and gives a bad light ; 
as well as a spring beetle out of that merry dancer round 
the sun, Mercury, the domestic Frenchman of the solar 
system, who always intoxicates himself in the sunshine, 
and yet, when he really comes before the sun, only looks 
like a black spot. Excellent professor, you now know 
everything, and many things much earlier than we do ; 
of which I only name to you Pallas, Ceres, Juno, and the 
planets discoverable in future. I will have no instructor 
out of Pallas, — a morsel broken from the earth, and, 
moreover, at such a distance, for light and heat, from the 
sun Apollo ; I purposely mention this dwarf planet, be- 
cause your preference for Athens, whose protecting deity 
Pallas was, might perhaps influence you. You must be 
partial to nothing but the next world, and my first child. 

" In one word, I do not know any distinguished star 
from which I would select my tutor, but the morning and 
evening star ; and so let it be, Gellert ! Much might be 
said about that star, — its double name indeed, says two 
things, — moreover it is named after the goddess of 
beauty; also after a certain light-bearer (Lucifer) not 
light-destroyer, — especially the star possesses this excel- 
lent quality (and many others) that it occupies a very 
perfect position in the heaven, neither too far from tho 
sun, nor too near the earth; and that (for children) it 
does not so strikingly wax and wane as the nearer moon. 
In short, I consider Venus to be the best nurse. And so, 
I beg my tutor may come from Hesperus. 

" For your son of Hesperus will certainly, I imagine, 



COMIC APPENDIX AND EPILOGUE. 155 

deal excellently with my child. He will — since liber- 
ality is in every case inestimable, and why not, then, in 
education, in the first place? — treat him with practical 
freedom and power, and not deprive him of his own. He 
will find little fault with what is childish. Quickly and 
perfectly apprehending what is outward, what inward, he 
will in no case make many words and vast preparations ; 
will draw him on to what is great and universal, not to 
what is insignificant ; will rather be the physician to his 
weakness, than the extinguisher of his strength. He will 
above all lend his aid to the child of earth ; and shine 
before and behind him as his starry dwelling, Hesperus, 
does for the earth, and that only when the sun has not 
yet risen, or is already set ; it is certain that so wise a 
Hesperid will not attempt to help the sun in the day- 
time ; I know him too well to suppose it possible. 

" Even in physical matters, he will not, with womanish 
anxiety, be perpetually fearful lest the child should break 
his leg against every twig, — though, indeed, the break- 
ing of a leg is better than the dread of it ; and, on the 
other liand, children are themselves careful, owing to the 
novelty of all their experiments, and the natural magni- 
fying of a place where they may fall, caused by the 
shortness of their own bodies, — or lest he should be 
poisoned by tin soldiers and children's trumpets, or hurt 
by a rocking-horse, or spoiled by wearing trousers. He 
who is so fearful on account of others, may himself be 
suspected of fear ; and a coward makes a coward, as a 
hermit does a hermit. Our ancestors, old Gellert, grew 
up sufficiently strong and modest with all their trousers, 
feather-beds, saddles, and spices. 

It would on another account be particularly agreeable 
to me that you choose my tutor out of Venus; because 



156 LEVANA. 

there, according to the best telescopes and astronomers, 
may be found the loftiest mountains, compared with 
which our Chimborazo were but a mole-hill, — and so 
the purest mountain air is near the hottest sultriness of 
the valley (I can readily picture to myself the heat of 
Lucifer or Venus). What a powerful, manly Alpine 
breast, joined to an Italy in the heart, must the inhabitant 
of Phosphorus bring to me at Baireuth, in the capacity 
of a right carefully selected tutor ; who must resemble a 
general full of contrasting powers, of irrevocable strictness 
and order, sincere friendship, good-fellowship, and per* 
suasiveness. 

" I am convinced my tutor will understand me when I 
say, that as the man can do without the scholar, but not 
the scholar without the man, I pray you above all things 
to ingraft the scholar upon the man, but not reversed. 
Our nineteenth century, (I might thus speak to him more 
distinctly in the evening under the warm rain of punch,) 
whatever century you may reckon on your little planet, 
will not be the best, at least not the strongest, although it 
may, like yours, deserve the names of Phosphorus and 
Lucifer. What we magnify ourselves about is the 
French Revolution, or the changes of something little. 
The stones which the giants formerly hurled became 
islands ; now, when islands are hurled, there come but 
stones, tombstones and grinding-stones. The Revolution, 
like an earthquake, put some motion into the skeletons of 
a charnel-house. Tutors, like the anatomist Walther in 
Berlin, seek their glory in preparing skeletons by remov- 
ing the flesh, and then bleaching them. Brother dwellers 
on Venus, or rather on this earth, could you think so? 
Then should I repent writing to Gellert. To impart 
strength, and to leave strength will, I hope, be your first 



COMIC APPENDIX AND EPILOGUE. 157 

and last words in education. What is educated for the 
age will be worse than the age. The Hesperid answers 
rae : ' In the spring-time of childhood, fathers often look 
in as far as the distant SDOW-white naountain-peaks, and 
point out the winter to the spring. Far better the wind- 
fall of a spring storm, than the snow-fall of age.' As true 
as beautiful ! candidate, I replj. Lavoisier made an in- 
strument of ice into a calorimetre, or measurer of heat ; 
thus fire is often measured by ice ; the boy by the gray- 
headed man. 

" The candidate will animadvert on much in the con- 
versational style of his paymaster ; but I go on, little 
affected by his remarks, — ' Howsoever I may express 
myself, it is certain that the artistic, compound-fractured 
style, into which writing-masters and tutors would break 
the souls of their pupils, like letters, is in nothing differ- 
ent from the compound fractures of surgeons, except in 
the case of wit, which truly requires variety in order to 
find without restraint distant resemblances.' The candi- 
date replies. ' If only to the innate energy of a child 
the sap of life, and room for its development be afforded, 
there will be no need to graft on every branch, to cut 
the leaves, or paint the flowers ; one must, like a king, 
direct tli€ whole, but not interfere with the individual 
parts.' 

" I exclaim, ' You are the man for me, (if not, indeed, 
more than a man !) If the tutor's situations which I 
once filled were yet vacant, you should be my vicar in 
them, — but you shall be so in the last, in the one I 
overlook and present as father and patron. / The easy 
conditions need scarcely be mentioned. You are not to 
torment the child with a thousand language? — for merely 
to learn languages is to throw away one's money in buy- 



158 LEVANA. 

ing beautiful purses, or to learn the Lord's Prayer in all 
languages without ever praying it.' 

" ' I agree, with all my heart ! ' said he boldly. * So you 
will only teach him French, English, Spanish, Italian ; — 
Greek, Latin, and German, of course, — but the last 
fliost thoroughly. As regards the sciences, the child will 
be fed by you, as its young are by the house-swallow, 
only on the wing, — not attached to any long appoint- 
oient of the hours of study.' 

" ' You know the human heart, and show a most beau- 
Uful one,' interrupted he, and drank. ' But when your 
usual eight hours of study are over, and the cliikl, or you, 
testify any further desire of study, you may, without 
hesitation, take as much from the second, or from the 
hist, third of the day, as you choose, and teach during the 
whole of it. Now in what appertains to science itself, — 
for the arts of dancing, fencing, swimming, riding, leap- 
ing, singing, playing on the violin, the horn, and the 
piano, will be recreations for both of you ; it will satisfy 
me if the poor child only learns history, — namely, as 
much of the past as is already gone; and also I would 
wish that, along with the most recent, a little of the 
piquante future should be insinuated, together with other 
not less necessary histories ; those of nature, of books, of 
heretics, of gods, of church history, &c., — in the same 
way a few of the most necessary branches of knowledge, 
— knowledge of the stars, of coins, of antiquity, of her- 
aldry, &c. ; and the doctrines of natural science, of juris- 
prudence, of medicine, of nobility, of morality, '&o. ; and 
the descriptions, — as descriptions of the earth, &:c. ; a 
few icSj as aesthetics, dietetics, phelloplastlcs, &c. ; for, 
say I, perpetually, why the Devil should a poor, unbearded, 
thin-skulled child be imnieasurablv laden with learned 



COMIC ArrEXDIX AND EPILOGUE. 159 

fat and refuse ? Why should his hfe be interwoven, not 
witli fair white leaves, but with whole full books ? And 
he himself become a pack and baggage-bearing Pegasus ? 
Wherefore this, say I ? ' x 

" You have to do, and can do, much ; for you are a 
few thousand tutors in one. Frequently I cannot at all 
understand why a whole regiment of tutors and govern- 
esses is not engaged at once ; especially when I consider 
how many demigods and goddesses the Romans ascribed 
to children, and worshipped ; for instance, Nascio, or Na- 
tio, presiding over the birth, — Rumina, over suckling, — 
Edusa, over eating, — Potina, over drinking, — moreover, 
Levana, — Statilinus and Statana, over the standing of 
both sexes, — Fabulinus, over speaking. I purposely 
omit, from detestation of prolixity in others, many half di- 
vinities, such as Vagitans, Ossitago, Nundina, Paventia, 
Carnea. Could one so arrange it, and pay, one should 
appoint a distinct teacher for almost every faculty, who 
should direct that only ; yea, and even teachers for the 
various subdivisions of the same faculty were at least 
pious wishes. I could like, (but nothing will come of it,) 
if I possessed that army of various teachers, to have a 
son exercised, say in aesthetics, according to the different 
divisions of Krug ; one teacher instructing him in that 
author's Hypseology, another in his Kalleology, a third in 
his Krimatology ; and so the child might at one time 
have his subhme tutor, at another his feeble, at another 
his naive. I would also wish, dear friend, that, in the 
virtues, you should prescribe special private exercises and 
instructions in each virtue, so that th(»y might not all run 
into one another, and the poor child stand there like 
a stupid angel, who knows neither right nor left, but only 
/\hat is riiiht. If Franklin schooled and exercised him- 



l6o LEVANA. 

self each week in a different virtue, might not the various 
Sundays and festivals, which as holidays can be used for 
little real instruction, be applied to the inculcation of 
many virtues ? On every festival might be taken a new 
one : on three holidays the three parts of repentance ; 
and on every Apostle's day some fault might be eradi- 
cated. I can, indeed, picture to myself a long feast of 
the Trinity, in which one might, hour by hour, allow tlie 
child to go through all the virtues^ so that at the prayer- 
bell he might be presented as a saint of a month, or holy 
image. 

" Moreover, so excellent a tutor for my child might 
rest assured that, were the good Gellert still living, I 
would with pleasure, at the end of his engagement (when 
Max w^ould no longer require him), and with all the 
influence which I, as an author, might possess with Gel- 
lert, give him recommendations to him, in order that he 
might further recommend the young man ; and so provide 
for him accordins; to his merits." 

At this point I awoke ; wanted to know what I had 
dreamed ; and tried to recall it. But I soon found that, 
out of my dreamed letter to Gellert, — quite in accord- 
ance with the mad order of a dream, — I had fallen 
into a new conversation with a teacher, who was there 
sitting before me. Meanwhile, such a conclusion may be 
in so far good, as, should I print it, it will serve to prove 
that I have not, as is, alas ! very usual, dreamed in 
sport, and for the sake of publishing, but in very deed 
and truth. 






FOURTH FRJGMENT. 



ON FEMALE EDUCATION. 



Chap. I. Jacqiielina's Confession of her Education, §§ 75-77. — 
Chap. II. Destination of Women less for their Husbands than for 
their Children, §§ 78 - 80. — Chap. III. Nature of Women, Proof of 
their Predominating Ptirity of Heart, ^§ 81 - 88. — Chap. IV. Edu- 
cation of Girls in Regard to Reasonableness, §§ 89, 90; to Purity 
of Heart and Love of their own Sex, ^91; to Gentleness, and the 
Tendency to Female Passionateness, ^ 92; to Economy of Living 
and Domestic Afisxirs, §§ 93-95; to Knowledge and Skill, ^§ 96, 97; 
to Dress, Ornament, &c., § 98; to Cheerfulness, § 99; Education of 
Girls endowed with Genius, § 100. — Chap. V. Private Instn;ctions 
of a Prince to the head Governess of his Daughter, § 101 

CHAPTER I. 




§75. 

UNDERSTAND under female educatkn 
three things at once, which are in themselves 
contradictory : first, the education which wo- 
men generally give ; second, their peculiar 
call to a right education as compared with men ; third, 
the education of girls. 

The first and second would have required an earliei 
consideration, if the characteristics of the female sex 
according to which its education should be resrulated 
were not united in them both \ and, especially, if in this 



Ib2 LEVANA. 

little experimental work, it were necessary to arrange thft 
position of its matter in very strict order. A reader, to 
whom so many systems are presented, must hold his way 
armed with a predetermined one, unless each is to occupy 
his mind in turn. 

§76. 

Ill-educated, and ill-educating states, as well as fathers 
immersed in business, can only trust the welfare of edu- 
cation to mothers, as the second chapter shall show ; but 
the evil that mothers might obviate can be easily stated 
in this paragraph. Were it in other respects accordant 
with the tone of this work, I willingly confess that I 
would oflTer to the world in a merrier manner this little 
register of sins, or list of losses in gaming, and debts of 
honor ; and the more so because, in this very case, a cer- 
tain, otherwise excellent, mother of five children, Mad- 
ame Jacquelina, luckily turning over the pages of my 
Levana, offered to give me an airy embodiment of it. 
Ladies love to dress, undress, and redress. For as 1 had 
known my excellent friend a long time, much was pre- 
pared and made easy ; and I could well imagine that 
the fair Jacquelina, as sister-orator for her whole sex, — 
though without any other commission to show than her 
beauty, — would stand before my writing-desk, as though 
it were a confessional, and declare she heartily desired 
to be absolved by me ; only, for very shame's sak' , it 
was impossible for her to make an auricular confession, 
but she would take it very kindly if I would regard her 
as a deaf person, — after the fashion of former confes- 
sors who pronounced the confession of their fair deaf 
and dumb penitents over them, — and so, as her repre- 
sentative, and spiritual father, make the following con 
fession for her : — 



ON FEMALE EDUCATION. 163 

§77. 

•' Honorable and dear Sir ! " (I was thus to put the 
address to nie into her own mouth, lest the joke should be 
continued,) " I confess before God and yourself, that I 
am a poor pedagogic sinner, and have broken many com- 
mands of Rousseau and of Campe. I confess that I 
never truly carried out any one principle for a month, 
but only for an hour or two ; that I have often, half 
with thought, and so half without thought, forbidden my 
children to do something, without afterwards observing 
whether they did it or not ; that I never could deny 
them anything, when both they and I were floating in 
the midst of a sea of happiness, which else, from calm 
reason, I should have at once refused ; and that precisely 
at two seasons, the most sunshiny and the most cloudy, 
whether of myself or of the children, did I spoil them 
most. Have I not even done still worse ? Have I 
not, when strangers w^ere present, said to my Bella, as 
well as to my pet, (I mean by that only my poodle,) 
Faites la belle ? 

" Have I not, at each of our great fairs, given holi- 
days on account of strangers' visits, especially those of 
eminent frequenters of the fair, to my husband, and thus 
valued a visitor more highly than five children ; so that 
I very little resembled that German woman, of whom 
my husband read in the twelfth volume of the mental 
Fama, who had the courage to decline dancing with two 
kings on the same evening, because she considered it to 
be unchristian ? And during all last year did I not 
see my two youngest children, Josephine and Peter, only 
once a day, at breakfast, and that merely because I 
wanted to finish a novel and a piece of worsted-work ; 
and, also, because my noble friend, the princess, for 



164 LEVANA. 

whom I was working it, had taken up her residence 
here ? Only this consideration can tranquilhze my con- 
science, that I took the greatest trouble to procure a 
trustworthy nurse for my little ones, who promised me 
to treat them as a real mother ; and may Heaven punish 
her if she was ever inattentive to so dear a trust, or ever 
let my precious lambs go out of her sight for a moment, 
or ever left them in the hands of strangers ! Ah, God ! 
when I think of the possibility of such a thing ! But, 
alas ! what do such creatures know of the anxieties of 
a tender mother's heart? 

" At other times I have indeed (and that consoles me) 
always allowed all my children to come to me twice a 
day, after breakfast and after dinner, and have then often 
for hours fondled and taught them. But I confess that 
my impetuosity would never let me be satisfied to kiss 
them in moderation, and so I drew on me my husband's 
blame, who dislikes that exceedingly, and says, ' Children 
(even if not my own) may, with the Princess of Conde, 
lament that their misfortune is to be loved by old people, 
— the holy seal of the heart, a kiss, is to children an 
emjity, meaningless thing ; a very energetic one may 
even be painful, and perhaps injurious, to the fiftli pair 
of nerves in the lips, — a gentle stroking of the head is 
better, and a gentle loving word, a kiss Avhich they give, 
and a softer one which they receive.' 

" I confess that, as in the game of forfeits, when I 
asked myself. What shall this forfeit (that of love) which 
I hold in my hand do ? I always answered. Love me 
immeasurably. Whereby, because I required so many 
mai*:s of love, I have made Josephine too sensitive, 
Sophia hypocritical, and Peter ill-tempered. After any 
severe [)unisliment I inflicted, instead of allowing the 



ON FEMALE EDUCATION. 165 

whole of my former love to glow warmly on them, 
(a striking change, which my husband says is the only 
means of correcting and reconciling a child, during at 
least the first eight or ten years,) I suffered the long cloud 
of after-wrath to hang over them ; as if their young 
hearts could trace hidden love, or suffer for it long, or, 
in the best case, not learn to imitate that sulkiness. 

" I confess that, though not in the least nervous at 
■whatever may happen out of the house, I yet never could 
be tranquil with my dear children, although I knew that 
the least impetuosity, were it even of a hasty running to 
their assistance, is injurious, and has a tendency to pro- 
duce a similar disposition in them. And I confess that 
I show anger too soon, even towards myjuaid-servants, 
in spite of my knowing perfectly what my husband so 
beautifully says, that to give way to an angry expression 
of countenance or of voice, before even the youngest 
children, is in fact to teach them anger. For as the 
whole soul is imprisoned and moulded into the whole 
body, it follows that every mental is connected with some 
physical part, and thus these mutually excite each other, 
— the outward expression of passion produces the mental 
emotion, and so of the reverse. 
, "" My husband asserted, and, moreover, carried out, the 
principle, that a husband can never so well establish a 
normal school for female teachers (like a good wife, I use 
his very expressions) as during the first year after mar- 
riage ; in this time, he thought, a wife might be mentally 
enriched with every kind of manly instruction, which, 
sTiouid she afterwards neglect, she would yet seek and 
cherish for the love of her first child, and of him who is 
even before the first, her husband ; for at an after period, 
continued he, somewhat of that glowing love -service 



l66 LEVANA. 

towards the husband, and somewhat, also, of tliat anxious 
solicitude about the children, vanishes ; and so, still con- 
tinued he, the education of many children does not pro- 
ceed better, at least, not more carefully. 1 But I rejoice 
that I have confuted him in this, as in many other things, 
and that I brought up my third child, even while expect- 
ing the fourth, for several months precisely as my wedded 
lord and schoolmaster directed during the school-weeks of 
the honeymoon. 

" But, venerable father, you certainly do not know by 
experience what whims husbands take some nine or ten 
months after marriage. Did not mine positively, seriously 
desire, that when I occasionally washed the little thinly I 
would not rub its face, and wipe it quickly up and dow:n ; 
because, said he, this kind of violence is disagreeable to 
them and excites their passion ; but that I would softly 
glide from above downwards, and then gently round ? 
What ridiculous pedantry ! Surely a woman must know 
how to wash ! So I go on just as usual, and care not how 
loudly both little and big cry out against it. 

" For the rest, I confess, and would willingly do penance 
for it, that I am never so soon angry as when dressing, 
or engaged in any other important business : the beauti- 
ful, perfect repose of my education then vanishes. My 
husband wants to place, for penance and the removal of 
my angry wrinkles, a magnifying-glass beside my toilet- 
glass ; but, thank God ! I do not yet need such a glass 
of detraction ; and besides my features are less changed 
than my color. Perhaps I am excusable for admitting 
my three eldest girls (and Lucy, too, often) to my toilet, 
because, in the first place, they watch me so gladly and 
are so quiet (especially when I tell them that they may 
perhaps go with me), and because, secondly, a young 



ON FEMALE EDUCATION. 167 

giiTs eye is best exercised in taste, with regard to matters 
of dress, on the costume of a grown-up person. 

" It consoles me, however, to reflect, that I never pur- 
chased a handsome new article of dress, either for myself 
or my daughters, without laboring to repress the love 
of finery, by telling them how little a woman's worth 
depends on dress, and that a rich habit is only chosen 
because thereby alone can rank be shown. At the same 
time I must confess, that all my daughters are vain : 
however many sermons I make to them during my toilet, 
I am not listened to, but only looked at. How often do 
I turn round with reproaches when my really beautiful 
Maximiliana stands behind me peeping into the glass, 
and say, ' There, again, a pretty, rosy, blue-eyed mask is 
looking at herself, and can never be tired of peeping and 
staring.' 

" I further confess, worthy Sir, that I was certainly in- 
finitely more displeased with Peter when he lately threw 
Veritas (really a most exquisite ideal figure from Ber- 
tuch's repository of arts) out of the window, than if he had 
told ten lies ; on the other hand, I hope I remain per- 
fectly tranquil when my husband sometimes makes such 
an uproar about some little fibs or other the children may 
have been telling ; or about their frequently quite justi- 
fiable scoldings of the servants : then, says be, reflecting 
on my anger, * The Romans did wisely when they wrote 
the initial letter of the word signifying man inverted to 
mean woman.' 

" If God will only forgive me the sins wherein I meant 
well, I shall be satisfied to be punished for the rest. I 
certainly have sinned much, and deserved temporal pun- 
ishments, and bad children. I will, however, from this 
time forth amend my educational life, and become better 



1 68 LEV AN A. 

and better ; and I entreat you, reverend, dear Sir, to for- 
give me my sins in God's stead." In which case I 
should certainly lay my hand on Jacquelina's round, white 
shoulder, and readily absolve her past, though truly not 
her future sins. 

§78. 
But the seriousness of the subject demands that a 



SECOND CHAPTER, 

ON THE DESTINATION OF THE FEMALE SEX, 

SHOULD restore to it its due honor. /A father, who 
only sees and educates his children for an hour or 
two, must be careful not to require his own hour's strict 
attention and persistency from the mother, who wearies 
herself with them all day long. This longer companion- 
ship excuses much maternal overflowing, both of love and 
anger. In the same w^ay, a stranger always considers 
parental displeasure too severe, because he sees the fault 
for the first time, and isolated, which the parents behold 
for the thousandth time, and in an ever-strengthening 
chain of habit. Mothers readily acquire an over-estima- 
tion of their children, because, placed sufficiently near the 
development of their minds to count every new leaf, they 
regard each universal human growth as a particular indi- 
vidual one, and thence infer some few miracles. And 
then how much must the physical care of the children 
which, in the middle classes, entirely devolves on the 
mother, weary and deaden her — as compared with the 
independent father — for their mental culture. 



WOMEN'S ADAPTATION TO CHILDREN. 169 

§79. 

The education of the first half of the first decade of hfe 
is already placed in the hands of the mother, owing to the 
necessities of the body. His avocations in the state, in 
science, or art, only grant the father intervals, and those 
rather for instruction than education, — two happy classes 
of fathers alone excepted. The first is a country gentle- 
man, who reposes in such a golden mean of all circum- 
stances, that he converts his mansion into a benevolent 
institution for his children, if he love his successors better 
than cards and hares and rents. The second is the man 
whom he appoints, — a country clergyman. The six 
days' leisure, the country's separation from the turmoil 
of towns, the open air, the office, which is itself a higher 
educational institution, and, finally, the seventh day, 
which presents their physical father to his children, on a 
glorifying elevation, as a holy and spiritual father, and 
impresses an official seal on the lessons of the ^veek, — 
all these things open to the minister a sphere of education 
into which he may attract other children ; since he may 
always better convert his parsonage into a school-house 
than a tutor's study into a parish. I would rather trust 
my son to a clergyman than to a tutor ; because he is 
freer, and stands on his legs, not upon crutches. 

In the middle ranks the men educate best, because the 
women are httle cultivated : in the higher classes, gen- 
erally, the women, because there they are more carefully 
brought up than the men. What, now, can the man do ? 
a philosopher, we will suppose, or a minister of public 
affairs, a soldier, a president, poet, or artist? 

In the very first instance, he must love and recompense 
liis wife better, in order that she, by double support, the 
love of her children and the love of her husband, may 
8 



170 LEVANA. 

more easily carry out the most difficult part of education, 
the first In this way the husband may bestow care and 
attention on the first and most important education, that 
given by the mother, which no after tutors, schools, or 
paternal praise and blame, can ever replace ; that is to 
say, he will exercise the law-giving power of education, 
the mother the administrative. Let the husband only 
continue to be the lover of his wife, and she will listen to 
what he says about education, at least of the mind. How 
readily will a noble-minded marriageable girl, or a bride, 
surveying from afar her future work, listen to the educa- 
tional rules which even a youth gives ! And, when mar- 
ried, a woman willingly adopts many a good suggestion 
about the education of her children which a stranger 
offers. Only by the union of manly energy and decision 
with womanly gentleness does the child rest and sail as 
at the conflux of two streams ; or, in another figure, the 
sun raises the tide, and so does the moon, but he raises it 
only one foot, she three, and both united four. The hus- 
band only marks full stops in the child's life, the wife 
commas and semicolons, and both more frequently. One 
might exclaim, " Mothers, be fathers ! " and " Fathers, be 
mothers ! " for the two sexes perfect the human race, as 
Mars and Venus gave birth to harmony. 'The man works 
by exciting powers ; the woman by maintaining order and 
harmony among them. The man, in whom the state, or 
his own genius, destroys the balance of powers for the 
advantage of one, will always bring this overlaying influ- 
ence to education ; the soldier will educate warhkely ; 
the poet, poetically ; the divine, piously ; the mother only 
will educate humanly. For only the woman needs to 
develop nothing in herself but the pure human being ; 
as in an ^olian harp no string predominates over the 



WOMEN'S ADAPTATION TO CHILDREN. 171 

rest, but the melody of its tones proceeds from unison, 
and returns to it. \ 

§80. 

But you mothers, and especially you in the higher and 
less busy classes, whose fortune spares you the heavy 
burden of careful housekeeping, and surrounds you with 
a cheerful green garden for the education of your chil- 
dren, how is it that you can prefer the tedium of sohtude 
and of society to the enduring charms of your children's 
love, — to the drama of their fair development, — to the 
sports of the best-beloved beings, — to the reward of the 
most delightful and lasting influence ? That woman is 
despicable who, having children, ever feels ennui. Well- 
formed nations have been, according to Herder, the edu- 
cators of the human race ; so let your beauty be, not 
merely the external garment, but the very instrument of 
instruction and education. Towns and countries have 
female names, and are represented as females ; and, in 
truth, the mothers who educate for the future the first 
five years of their children's life do found cities and 
countries. Who can replace a mother ? Not even a 
father. For she, attached to the child by the daily and 
nightly bonds of care for its physical wants, can and must 
weave and embroider mental instruction in glittering char- 
acters on those tender ties. Will you, then, neglect the 
fairest time for working purely and deeply on posterity, 
since the stronger sex and the state will soon step in, and 
bring puUies and grappling-irons instead of your leading- 
strings and gently raising levers, and therewith move 
them harshly and roughly ? Dost thou, royal mother, 
consider it nobler to guide the intrigues of a cabinet, than 
the little future heir-apparent? Thou hast borne him 



172 LEVANA. 

within thee, when a heavier burden, and hast suffered 
acutest pain when he was taken from thee, and this only 
for his physical life; and wilt thou shun to undertake 
something less than both these, whereby thou mayest 
draw a lioly spiritual glory around thy victory ? How 
often are your night-watches recompensed by a child's 
coffin ; but your day-watches over his mind ever by rich 
daily rewards ! If you once believe that everything de- 
pends on education, what name do you deserve, when, 
precisely as your position is high, you intrust the educa- 
tion of your children to persons of lower rank ; and while 
the children of the middle classes have their parents, 
those of the higher classes have only nurses and maids, 
as the directors of their path in life ? 

The whole ancient world elevates maternal above pa- 
ternal love ; and the mother's must be great indeed, for 
a loving father cannot even picture to himself any love 
greater than his own ; w^hy, then, are you, compared with 
the fathers, who are so anxious about education, and who 
even write great books upon the subject, so indifferent 
about its appHcation? For your lover you can freely 
give wealth and health ; why not then spare a few hours 
for the little helpless creature you love ? For the one 
you overcome opinions and inclinations ; why should you 
do less for the other? You, on whose physically and 
spiritually nourishing bosom Nature has cast the orphans 
of the earth, will you let them fade and die on a cold, 
hired breast? You, who are provided by nature with 
patience, grace, gentleness, elocuence, and love for the 
beings who fly to you even fron their father, can you not 
watch over them ? I do not mean during the night, but 
only during the day. See ! they who once rested be- 
neath your heart and have now no longer a place in it, 



WOMEN'S ADxVPTATION TO CHILDREN. I73 

Stretch their little arms towards her who is most related 
to them, and beg again for nourishment. As in many 
ancient nations no request was denied to a woman hold- 
ing a child in her arms, so now do children, lying in 
your arms, or in their nurse's, offer up petitions for them- 
selves. 

/ It is true that the sacrifices you make for the world 
will be little known by it ; — men govern and earn the 
glory ; and the thousand watchful nights and sacrifices 
by which a mother purchases a hero or a poet for the 
state are forgotten, not once counted ; for the moth- 
ers themselves do not count them ; and so, one cen- 
tury after another, do mothers, unnamed and unthanked, 
send forth the arrows, the suns, the storm-birds, and the 
nightingales of time ! ^ But seldom does a Cornelia find a 
Plutarch, who connects her name with the Gracchi. But 
as those two sons who bore their mother to the temple of 
Delphi were rewarded by death, so your guidance of your 
children Avill only find its perfect recompense at the ter- 
mination of life. 

Twice, however, you will not be forgotten. If you 
believe in an invisible world in which the glad tears of a 
thankful heart are more valued, and shine more brightly, 
than worldly crowns set round with the petrified tears of 
sorrow ; if you believe this, you know your future ! And 
if you have educated rightly, your child knows you. 
Never, never has one forgotten his pure, right-educating 
mother. On the blue mountains of our dim childhood, 
towards which we ever turn and look, stand the moth- 
ers who marked out to us from thence our life : the most 
blessed age must be forgotten ere we can forget the 
warmest heart. You wish, women ! to be ardently 
loved, and forever, even till deatb. Be, then, the moth- 



174 LEVANA. 

ers of your cliiklren. But you mothers who do not 
educate your children, how should your thanklessness for 
an unmerited blessing cause you to hang down your head 
m shame before every childless mother, e/ery childless 
wife, and blush because one worthy woman sighs after 
that heaven which you have abandoned like a fallen an- 
gel. Oh ! why does liite, which often gives a million souls 
to the rack of some barbarous century, deny to the most 
lovely, gentle being the bliss of one child's heart ? Why 
must Love long for an object, and Hate, not ? Ah ! Er- 
nestina,* how wouldst thou have loved and made happy ! 
But thou wast not permitted ; the death-cloud carried thee 
away with all the roses of thy youth, and thy Avarm 
mother's heart was called, childless, into the unknown 
world of spirits. Oh ! how wouldst thou have loved and 
educated with thy clearness of perception, thy strength 
of character, thy ever-flowing spring of love, thy self-sac- 
rificing soul, — thou, who wert adorned with all the vir- 
tues of an ancient German woman ! 

* The excellent lady to whom the poet here pens so fine a memo- 
rial, was his wife's younger sister, Ernestina Augusta Philippina Mahl- 
mann, the daughter of Mr. Mayer of Berlin, and wife of Augustus 
Mahlmann, of Leipsic. She died, February 18, 1805, in the twenty- 
sixth year of her age. The desire to press a child to her heart occu- 
pied the last moments before her death. She was one of the noblest 
beings that ever lived. 



NATURE OF WOMEN. 175 



CHAPTER III. 



NATURE OF WOMEN. 
§ 81. 

THE education of daughters is the first, and most im- 
portant business of mothers ; because it may be un- 
interrupted, and continue till the daughter's hand glides 
straight from the mother's into that which holds the wed- 
ding-ring. The boy is educated by a many-toned world, 
school-classes, universities, travels, business, and libraries ; 
the mother's mind educates the daughter. For that very 
reason he is more independent of the shocks of foreign 
influence than his sister ; for outward contradiction com- 
pels him to an inner balancing unity, whereas one little 
corner of the world easily appears a whole quarter, nay, 
a whole world, to the maiden. 

Before we speak of the education of the sex, we must 
first determine its character. ' According to well-known 
principles the nature of ,men is more epic, and formed for 
reflection ; that of women more lyrical, and endowed with 
feeling.\ Campe truly remarks, that the French have all 
the failings and perfections of children ; hence, I believe, 
they gladly call themselves Athenians, whom the old 
Egyptian priest found at once veiy childlike and very 
childish. I have discussed more at large in other places 
the great resemblance between the character of the 
French nation and that of women. From these two as- 
sertions, at least from the more flattering, a third would 
follow, the resemblance between women and children. 
The same unbroken unity of nature, the same clear 
perception and understanding of the present, the same 



176 LEVANA. 

sharpness of wit, the keen spirit of observation, ardor 
and quietness, excitabihty and easily raised emotions, 
the ready, quick passage from the inward to the out- 
ward, and, conversely, from gods to ribbons, from motes 
in the sunbeam to solar systems, the admiration of 
forms and colors, and excitability, carry out, by a men- 
tal alliance, the physical alliance of the two beings. 
Hence, to use an appropriate simile, children are in the 
first instance dressed in women's habits. 

He who loves antitheses of the newest fashion might 
call women antique, Grecian, or even Oriental beings ; 
men, on the contrary, modern, northern, European ; those 
poetical, these philosophical. A man possesses, as it 
were, two selfs ; a woman but one, and needs another to 
see her own. From this female deficiency of holding 
dialogues with, and multiplying self, may be explained 
most of the advantages and disadvantages of woman's 
nature. And so, because their near echo readily becomes 
a resonance, and, confused with the original sound, they 
can neither poetically nor philosophically separate and 
reunite their component parts, they are more truly poetry 
and philosophy than poets and philosophers. Women 
show more taste in dressing others than themselves ; and, 
precisely because it is the same with their bodies as with 
their hearts, they can read in those of others better than 
in their own. 

§82. 

We will in various ways pursue the unity and sincer- 
ity of woman's nature. Because in her no power pre- 
dominates, and all her powers are rather receptive than 
formative ; because she, true mirror of the versatile 
present, accompanies every external by au internal 



NATURE OF WOMEN. 177 

change ; even because of these things does she seem to 
us so enigmatic. To guess what her soul is, means to 
guess her physical and other external relations ; hence, 
the man of the world loves her as well, and names her 
after those long thin wine-glasses, called impossibles, be- 
cause they cannot be emptied how high soever you raise 
them. 

Like the piano-forte, we might call her pianissimo-fortis- 
simo, so accurately and strongly does she reflect the ex- 
tremes of accident ; at the same time, and for this very 
reason, her natural position must be one of repose and 
equal balance, like Vesta, whose holy fire none but women 
tended, and which everywhere, in town, temple, or pri- 
vate room, took, by law, the middle place. 

Passion drives the man, passions the woman ; him a 
stream, her the winds : he declares some one power to be 
monarchic, and suffers himself to be ruled by it; she, 
more democratic, lets the passing moment rule. The man 
is more frequently serious ; the woman, for the most part, 
either blessed or cursed, joyful or sorrowful ; which does 
not contradict our former praise of her measured tranquil 
constitution ; for cheerfulness dwells all day with one 
woman, sadness with another; it is only passion that 
hurls both headlong. 

§83. 

Love is the life-spirit of her spirit ; her spirit the law, 
the motive-spring of her nerves. How deeply she can. 
love without cause, and without return, might be remarked, 
even if not shown in her love of children, in her dislikes, 
which prey on her as strongly and unreasonably as her love 
animates. Like the Otaheitans, who are so gentle and 
childlike, and yet eat their enemies alive, these delicate 

8* L 



178 LEVANA. 

creatures have a similar appetite, at least for their fema^g 
foes. They often yoke doves to a thunder-car. The 
somewhat slirewish Juno demanded, and obtained, from 
antiquity, gentle lambs as her favorite sacrifice. Women 
love, and that infinitely and truly ; the most enthusiastic 
mystics were women ; it was no man, but a nun, who died 
of longing love to Jesus. But it was only a man, and no 
woman, who could demand from the Stoic sage indiffer- 
ence to friendship. lS[ature sent women into the world, 
with this bridal dower of love, not, as men often think, 
that they may altogether and entirely love them from the 
crown of their head to the sole of their feet, but for this 
reason, — that they might be, what their destination is, 
mothers, and love children, to whom sacrifices must ever 
be offered, and from whom none are to be obtained. 

Woman, in accordance witli her unbroken, clear-seeing 
nature, loses herself, and what she has of heart and hap- 
piness, in the object she loves. The present only exists 
to her ; and this present, again, is a determinate one, it is 
one, and only one, human being. As Swift loved not the 
human race, but only individuals belonging to it, so wo- 
men, though they have the warmest hearts, are no citizens 
of the world, scarcely citizens of a town or a village, but 
only of their home ; no woman can at the same time love 
the four quarters of the world and her own child, but a 
man can. He loves the idea ; she the manifestation, that 
which alone is ; as God — if this bold figure be not too 
bold — has only one loved object, — his universe. This 
peculiarity shows in many other w^ays. Men love things 
best ; for instance, truths, possessions, countries ; women 
love persons best : the former, it is true , readily personify 
what they love. Just as what is the goddess of wisdom to 
a man, to a woman easily becomes a man who has wis- 



NATURE OF WOMEN. 1 79 

dom. Even when a child, a woman loves a mock-human 
being, a doll, and works for it ; the boy gets hold of a 
wooden horse and a troop of tin soldiers, and works with 
them. It probably arises from this very fact, that among 
boys and girls, sent at the same age to school, though the 
latter mature sooner, they yet retain their play-persons 
longer than boys do their playthings. When, however, 
grown-up women of the lower classes look intensely after 
a beautiful doll, carried by a child in the higher ranks of 
life, it seems their love of dress may exceed their love of 
children. Further, girls kiss one another more frequently 
than boys ; those look at the rider, these at the horse ; 
those inquire about appearances, these about their causes ; 
those about children, these about animals. 

§84. 

The more corrupt a century, the more contempt is 
there in it for women. The more slavery in the form, or 
formlessness, of government, the more do they become the 
handmaidens of servants. In old free Germany, women 
were considered sacred, and, like their images, the doves 
of Jupiter at Dodona, pronounced oracles ; in Sparta and 
England, and in the fair age of chivalry, women bore the 
order-jewels of man's reverence. Now, since women rise 
and fall, become noble or base, according to the form of 
government, — and this is constantly created and main- 
tained by men, — it is clear that women, after the charac- 
ter of men is formed, imitate that model : that there must 
first be seducing men before seduced women ; that every 
deterioration of the female character is but the after-win- 
ter of a similar one in men. Place moral heroes in the 
field, and heroines follow them as brides : but the opposite 
does not hold true ; no heroine can create a \ero through 



l8o LEVANA. 

love of her, but she may give birth to one. Therefore, 
all the more contemptible is the narrow-minded, squeam- 
ish Parisian man, who makes tirades against the Parisian 
women, and, consequently, against all women ; while he 
only ingrafts on them his own old sins, and poisons their 
womanhood by his own womanishness. How would such 
a plaster-cast creature of the age stand and tremble and 
wither away before a Spartan or an ancient German 
woman ! 

Consequently, the present age, in complaining of female 
sensuality, admits the previous existence of the sin in 
men. Meanwhile, let the Devil's advocates stand forth 
against women, and those of holiness for them, and to the 
advantage of women. There are many satirical creatures 
who get something printed, and are viewed with wonder, 
and written up by German critics as men deeply read in 
human nature ; for no other reason than this, because, 
without any further pretension to knowledge of the world, 
insight, heart, or mind, they have converted every woman 
into nothing more than a fifth or sixth sense, and all their 
own desires into one overlaying one : and then, especially 
the critic (he 's a school-teacher), thanks God and the au- 
thor, that now, for a few pence, which he does not pay, 
but receives as a reward for his favor, he at last holds in 
his hand the key of the French and allied female castle. 

These denouncers of women are, at all events, only 
half right, and certainly half wrong ; the former when 
they speak of physiological, the latter when of moral sen- 
suality. Of the former — when without the concurrence 
of a perfectly innocent heart — no one is guilty, but God 
the Father ; and just as well might the greater beauty of 
a woman's bosom be attributed to her as a sin and excess. 
But if Heaven created her especially for children, it is 



NATURE OF WOMEN. l8l 

manifest that this physiological sensuality was ordained by 
the great Father of all children for the advantage of the 
growing after-world. The first dwelling which man in- 
habits is an organized one ; and can this be too rich, too 
strong for his first original formation ? Can want of power 
and life ever form an organic creatnre full of power and 
life ? And which moment is the most important in the 
whole life? Certainly not the last, as theologians have 
often stated ; but probably the first, as physicians show. 

On the other hand, as a counterpoise, there is allotted 
to the senses of woman a purer heart than that of man, 
which makes common cause with them ; and thus the 
accusation of her physical conformation closes with an 
eulogy on her spiritual nature. But these good beings do 
not defend themselves save by proxy ; and it is probable 
that, with their facility of belief, mistrustful words may at 
last tura their watchfulness away from their inward heart ; 
just as many lose their religion, or their religious sen- 
timents, without knowing how, merely because they hear 
discussions, and nothing else, about it. 

§85. 

Nature has directly formed woman to be a mother, 
only indirectly to be a wife; man, on the contraiy, is 
rather made to be a hrisband than a father. It were, in- 
deed, somewhat strange if the stronger sex must lean on 
the weaker, the fiower support its stem, the ivy the tree ; 
nevertheless he. Just because he is the stronger, does 
enforce something of that kind, makes his wife into the 
bearer of his arms and burdens, his marketer and pro- 
vision cooker ; and the husband regards the wife as the 
barn and outer shed of his household goods. He is far 
more created for her than she for him ; she is for physical. 



l82 LEVANA. 

■what he is for mental posterity. Fleets and armies prove 
the dispensableness of women ; on the contrary, societies 
of women — convents, for instance — do not arise without 
some male directing lever as primmn mobile. Nature, 
which moves on kindly, yet cruelly, towards her vast ends 
in the world, has, for this purpose, armed women, — 
the colleges and training-houses of posterity, — men- 
tally and physically, with power of giving and power of 
denying: both their physical and mental charms and 
weaknesses aiTord them protection. Hence arise regard 
and attention to their persons, with which their souls are 
more intimately united into one existence than ours; 
hence their dread of wounds, because these affect a double 
life, and their indifference to sickness ; whereas men fear 
wounds less than illnesses, because those affect the body 
most, these the mind. Connected with these are her 
temperance, her love of cleanliness, and also her modesty 
and her inclination to housewifery and quietness. The 
moral and apprehensive nature of girls is more rapidly 
developed than the mind of boys (as, according to Zach, 
satellites move quicker than planets ; or, as flowers in 
valleys bloom sooner than on mountains) ; because to the 
physical, and consequently maternal, maturity of fifteen 
Nature has also added that of the mind. So soon as the 
luxuriant flower has, with its pollen, provided for another 
spring. Nature harshly destroys its attractive colors, and 
leaves it to its mental treasures and harvest. On the 
contrary, she preserves man's body, which has to serve on 
a longer journey of action and thought, active into the vale 
of years, and far beyond the season of woman's bloom. 

We may here subjoin this remark, drawn from the 
animal kingdom, tliat the mare shows his greatest cour- 
age and power in the love-season, but the female after 
having given birth to her oif-pring. 



NATURE OF WOMEN. 183 

It is easy to draw out these assertions into the lesser 
matters of detail ; for instance, female avarice, which 
saves, not for self, but for her children, love of trifles, 
love of talking, the gentle voice, and many things which 

we blame. 

§86. 

We return to the former complaints about women. 
But why do men use this word so often, about those 
beings to whom they owe the first thanks for existence, 
and who are sacrificed by Nature herself that life may 
follow life ? Why are the treasure-houses of humanity, 
its creators under God, not esteemed more highly ? and 
why do they only receive the wreath of corn-ears to 
carry, because it is prickly ? Were there only one 
father on the earth, we should worship him ; but were 
there only one mother, we should reverence and love her 
as well as worship. 

The noblest and fairest quality with which Nature 
could and must furnish women, for the benefit of pos- 
terity, was love, the most ardent, yet without return, 
and for an object unlike itself. The child receives love, 
and kisses, and night-watchings, but at first it only 
answers with rebuffs ; and the weak creature, which 
requires most, pays least. But the mother gives un- 
ceasingly ; yea, her love only becomes greater with the 
necessity and thanklessness of the recipient, and she feels 
the greatest for the most feeble, as the father for the 
strongest child. 

" But," it may be objected to this view of woman's 
destination, " women particularly seek after and honor 
all mental or physical power ; they love their own sex 
little, and judge its weaknesses more harshly than the 
loughness of men. However angry a master no ay be 



184 LEVANA. 

with his servant, a mistress is far more so with her slave, 
whether in the colonies or in Germany ; and the Roman 
ladies cliose to have their toilets performed by maidens 
with bared bosoms, so that they might, at the least mis- 
take in dressing, stick pins into them for punishment 
Mothers, as well as courts, celebrate the birth of a prin- 
cess with fewer cannon-shots than that of a prince. If 
a woman, in any trick of cards, is asked to fix on some 
one card, she always chooses the king or knave, at all 
events, never a queen ; and actresses like to perform 
no parts better than those of disguised young men. 
But one does not need to be very long in Paris, or 
in the world, ay, or upon the world, to guess what 
they want by it." 

Nothing bad ; but a protector for their children. As 
Herder has beautifully remarked, Nature has implanted 
reverence for men in women's heart ; from this rever- 
ence springs, in the first instance, love for men, but 
afterwards it passes into love for children. If even 
men, loving with the fancy, and after preconceived 
notions, far more than with the heart, follow actresses, 
because they have seen them play fine romantic char- 
acters, — queens, goddesses, heroines, yes, heroines of 
virtue, — why should not women fall in love from rev- 
erence, when they see us play the greatest parts, not as 
an actress does Lucretia, Desdemona, or Iphigenia, for 
a short evening's amusement, but for years o^ sober- 
seriousness on the theatre of the world or of tnc state : 
one man is a hero, another a president, a third a king, 
a fourth a world teacher I mean an author. Children 
demand this love of the mother for their father as their 
inheritance, or pledged property, jmd she can only keep 
some interest ; until, in old age, when the children tliem 



NATURE OF WOMEN. 185 

selves are parents, she, a gray-headed woman, as silver- 
bride,* again experiences a kind of love for her silver- 
bridegroom. In a childless marriage the wife regards 
the husband as ber first and only son, possessed of 
qualities which constitute her true honor, and support 
her during her whole life ; and she loves the young 
man unutterably. 

§87. 

If a young woman cherish a love repressed into the 
bud of esteem, she will do little less than all for her 
lover, or what a mother does for her child. She forgets 
herself in him, because only through him does she re- 
member herself; and her paradise is only valued as 
a condition and fore-court of heaven to him : and she 
would receive a hell at the same price. Her heart is 
the citadel, everything else is but the suburbs and country 
round about it ; and only with the former is the latter 
vanquished. 

If it be true that the lost, in their haunts of misery, 
would gladly exchange the poisonous lures by which they 
must maintain and deceive themselves, for the SAveet 
intoxication of sincere, heart-felt love, will not the fresh 
virgin heart resign all for the sunrise of life, for the first 
unbounded love, which is ardent in accrvdance with its 
purity and its previous non-existence, to the God-man ; 
who, for a being hitherto bound to a little corner of the 
world, suddenly reveals a whole new w^orld, which is, for 
the maiden, this world joined with the next. "Who, 
then, shall restrain the gratitude of love towards him 

* The twenty-fifth anniversary of a married couple's wedding-day 
is called in Germany their silver wedding-day; the fiftieth, theil 
golden wedding-day. 



l86 LEVANA. 

who has opened happiness and freedom to a mind 
chained to the narrow present, who has embodied all 
those dreams which formerly the unoccupied soul per- 
sonified in the stars, in spring-time, in friends, and child- 
like duties? I know him well who shall place that 
restraint ; even he who requires the opposite, — the 
lover. Certainly a wisely and purely educated maiden 
is so poetic a flower of this dull world, that the sight 
of this glorious blossom, hanging, some years after the 
honeymoon, with yellow, faded leaves in unwatered beds, 
must grieve any man who beholds it with a poet's eye ; 
and who must, consequently, in sorrow over the common 
usefulness and servitude of the merely human life, over 
the difference between the virgin and the matron, utter 
the deadliest wishes ; yes, I say, he would rather send 
the virgin, with her wreath of rose-buds, her tenderness, 
her ignorance of the sufferings of life, her dream-[)ictures 
of a holy Eden, into the graveyard of earth, which is 
God's field, than into the waste places of life. Yet, do 
it not, poet : the virgin becomes a mother, and again 
gives birth to the youth and the Eden which have fled 
from her ; and to the mother herself they return, and 
fairer than before : and so let it be as it is ! 

§88. 

How is it that in morally, as well as architecturaVfy,* 
undermined Paris, the women read the characters of 
Heloise, Attila, Valeria, in which only the love of the 
heart plays and burns with as great eagerness as love- 
letters ? Women, even old women, and young men 
devour such works ; whereas older men prefer being 
devoured by works of a very different kind. As in 

* It is wel] k!;o\vn that Paris i< built from the qiiarries beneath it. 



NATURE OF WOMEN. 187 

a well-plajed game of chess, or in war, lie wins Mho 
makes the first move, so must women, as the assaulted 
party, succumb. But who attacks us, save ourselves ? 
And which is more guilty, the serpent on the tree, or 
Eve under the tree ? And how small and transitory is 
often the price for which we bargain away the whole 
happiness of a woman's life ! It is like Xerxes who 
carried war into Greece because he liked eating Attic 
figs. 

Further : a woman's imagination, not worn-out like a 
man's, by wine and excitement, must all the more easily 
burst, on our account, into those flames which consume 
happiness. 

Hippel remarks, and with justice, that a man overtaken 
in wrong-doing is ashamed and speechless, that a woman 
becomes bold and passionately indignant. And this is the 
cause of it : the man clearly beholds himself, not so the 
woman ; therefore she the more readily makes her inno- 
cence appear both to others and herself. In short, our 
sins are more generally intentional ; hers thoughtless, and 
tlierefore the more excusable. 

And finally : there are everywhere more chaste dam- 
sels than young men, more chaste women than men, more 
old maids than old bachelors. Man, however, may glorify 
himself on two accounts. First, his relations to life and 
the world and his courage lead him more frequently into 
temptations ; — and second, the man who preserves his 
chastity from principle, possesses therein a praetorian 
band ; but the woman who protects hers with her heart, 
and from regard to social morality, has a guardian angel 
und guard of honor. The cohort, however, is stronger 
than the angel and the guard. 



l88 LEVANA. 



CHAPTER IV. 

EDUCATION OF GIRLS. 

§89. 
/ 

AFTER the last chapter this might be a short one, 
because, according to it, girls are to be educated as 
mothers, that is, as teachers. Our only duty would con- 
sist in giving them printed and verbal lessons in instruc- 
tion : and for this purpose no more susceptible period is 
offered to the parents than the time of hope and the six 
months of their daughter's engagement ; nor to the hus- 
band, than the first year of wedded life : and then, again, 
that the elder daughters should be permitted to educate 
the younger. The last is probably the most spiritual 
school for obtaining clearness of ideas, patience, and cir- 
cumspection to which pai'ents can send their daughters ; 
unfortunately it is closed against the youngest child. 

But before and after being a mother, a girl is a human 
being ; and neither motherly nor wifely destination can 
overbalance or substitute the human, but must become its 
means, not end. As above the poet, the painter, or the 
hero, so, above the mother, does the human being rise 
pre-eminent : and as the artist, while forming his work, 
does at the same time form something higher, — himself, 
the creator of that work ; so the mother forms, along with 
the child, her own more holy self. Every divinely 
human thing has attached to it by nature the condition 
of locality ; the ideal dwells within the bodily manifesta- 
tion, the flower pollen within its cup : the costHest pearls, 
so easily lost, are strung on common bands and threads, 
and pierced in order to be preserved. 



EDUCATION OF GIRLS. 189 

Since Nature has ordained woman for maternity, it has 
also ordered her development ; and we need but not to 
oppose nor anticipate its determination?-. But as it 
always labors blindly and fixedly on, only for its own 
one-sided aims, its end or ends, so education must not 
attempt to vanquish it, — for every natural energy is 
holy, — but to make the whole nature complete by soften- 
ing, purifying, and harmonizing the preponderating power 
by means of the other balancing powers. \ 

§90. 

A woman feels, but does not see, herself; she is all 
heart ; her very ears are ears of the heart. To observe 
herself and what appertains thereunto, viz. reasons, is too 
disagreeable for her. Perhaps it was on this account that 
our ancient jurisprudence sooner relieved a man than a 
woman from an oath, but applied the torture sooner to 
him than to her. Reasons change and affect the firm 
man more easily than the weak, versatile woman, as light- 
ning passes better through solid bodies than through the 
thin air. 

What then will happen ? Feelings come and go like 
light troops following the victory of the present : but 
principles, like troops of the line, are undisturbed and 
stand fast. Shall we now, by anatomizing it, rob the heart 
of its fair fulness of inner life. It were sad if one could 
do it ; but Sommering, after the thousand ears he has 
dissected, still experiences the charms of harmony ; and 
the philosopher, even after publishing his theory of morals 
and of taste, still feels the power of conscience and of 
beauty. 

Let a girl learn to prove, analyze, and explain, not her 
feeling, but the object of that feeling ; and then, having 



190 LEVANA. 

experienced the wrongness of the object, she will be com- 
pelled during the whole continuance of the sensation to 
follow only the hisight she has gained. Do not oppose 
the feelings, but the imagination. 

This, in a picture of war, for instance, compresses the 
miseries of a nation into one heart ; those of a day or of 
a year into one moment ; the various possibilities into one 
certainty ; now, if by means of the severing concave 
mirror of reason, we separate this fancied focus into its 
various individual rays, the feeling is not destroyed, but 
only deferred. But, dear mother, cherish and protect 
every warm and tender feeling which years themselves 
bring and form, and do not revel in the sensibility of your 
youngest daughter, and lose yourself in tears of love 
while relating some lamentable story, or imparting such 
feelings in all their nakedness. For in future years 
either these beings will succumb to their feelings, or their 
feelings to them. Feelings, flowers, and butterflies live 
all the longer the later they are developed. Anything, 
whether mental or physical, which will certainly some 
one time come into real existence, may without injury 
arrive, somewhat late, but not too soon ;^and the Germans 
of Tacitus preserved without disadvantage that heart 
full of energy which they gave forever to one, even 
though it might not be a young virginal one, which had 
beaten for them in many battles. 

Sin not against your daughters, nor blasphemously 
offend the spirit of God, by showing and recommending, 
even indirectly, any excellence they may possess, be it 
art, science, or the sanctuary of the heart, as a lure to 
men, or bait for catching a husband : to do so is truly to 
shoot wild fowl with diamonds, or to knock down fruit 
with a sceptre. Instead of making heaven a means and 



EDUCATION OF GIRLS. 191 

handle for this earth, we should, in the highest possible 
degree, elevate this as a means of attaining that. Only 
an understanding of the general regulation of a house — 
order, knowledge of housekeeping, and similar matters — 
should be spoken of as valuable for the future groundwork 
of the marriage tie. The so-called lady-like accomplish- 
ments are, at most, but garlands of flowers by which 
Cupid may be bound ; but Hymen, who breaks through 
these, and garlands of fruit too, is best guided and held 
by the golden official cliain of domestic capability. 

By means of eloquence impart clearness to principles, 
and by means of repetition give the power of comprehen- 
sion, — and, especially, permit as little as possible the 
enjoyment of self-commiseration, which, merely to retain 
excessive pain, flies from every cheerful light. Hatred 
and punishment of every humor, war against every ob- 
jectless frame of mind, are exercises. Even in the 
smallest matters, let nothing wilful pass unpunL^jhed in 
your daughters. 

For all this, some man is needed, round whose firm 
stem this weak, wavering flower-stalk may be trained. A 
lover before marriage generally prefers looking at the 
rainbow of tearful sensibilities, of fickle whims, and help- 
less weaknesses ; but after marriage, when the rainbow 
turns into wet weather, he requires reasonableness and 
thoroughness, because he suffers more from whims which 
are perpetually recurring, than from graver faults ; and, 
if he does not find these qualities, he awakes from his 
particular dreams without finding them realized. His 
dreams are these : he had, forsooth, when a lover, in va- 
rious pastoral Arcadian hours of the heart, led his love to 
different resolutions, — for which he had given his own 
good reasons, — hence he was led to expect a marriage 



192 LEVANA. 

full of governing reasons. " For," said he, " if now, in the 
v;armth of youth, she already follows reasons, what will 
she do when cooler and older? '* Merely the very oj posite. 
For she had only paid attention to his wishes, not to his 
chain of reasoning, and done everything solely from love. 
Wherefore, ye husbands, retain the love of your wives, 
and you are raised above the necessity of sermons on rea- 
son. Should it be more difficult, or more unprofitable, 
to live and act in company with your own wife and 
household queen, than to enter into partnership with the 
Virgin Mary, the queen of heaven, as a merchant in Mes- 
sina did, and honorably handed over to her the share of 
his profits ? 

Preserve girls from fear and affectation, which, for the 
most part, find place where reason is excluded. Even at 
a very early age you may cover with a many-colored 
veil many imaginary fears : for instance, you may tell a 
child that the first clap of thunder he hears is the rolling 
of the chariot on which the so long expected spring ar- 
rives ; or you may yourself unconcernedly regard animals 
which alarm by the rapidity of their movements, as mice ; 
or by their size, as horses ; or by their unpleasing forms, 
as spiders and toads. Then direct the child's eye from 
the whole to the individual beautiful limbs, and gradually, 
without compulsion, draw child and beast together : for 
/ children, unlike animals governed by instinct, have scarce- 
ly any other fear than that produced by strangeness. 
One scream of fear from a mother may resound through 
the whole life of her daughter ; for no rational discourse 
can extinguish the mother's scream. You may make any 
full stop, colon, semicolon, or comma of life before your 
children, but not a note of exclamation ! 



EDUCATION OF GIRLS. I93 

§91. 
The morality of girls is custom, not principle. Boys 
might be improved by the bad example of drunken Hel- 
ots ; girls only by a good one. Even boys return from 
the Augean stable of the world with some of its smell 
adhering to them ; but girls are frail, white Parisian ap- 
ple-blossoms, parlor-flowers, from which decay must be 
averted, not with the hand, but with fine camel-hair brush- 
es. They, like the priestesses of antiquity, should be 
educated only in holy places, and never hear, nor much 
less see, what is rude, immoral, or violent. Magdalena 
Pazzi said, on her death-bed, that she did not know what 
a sin against modesty was : let education at least try to 
imitate this example. Girls, hke pearls and peacocks, 
are valued for no other color than the most perfect 
whiteness. A corrupt youth may lay down a noble book, 
walk up and down the room in passionate tears, and ex- 
claim, " I will amend " ; and keep his word. At the end 
of forty years, Rousseau accomplished his first transfor- 
mation from the caterpillar state, and continued in it until 
death removed him by a second change. I have hitherto 
read of few women who have reformed themselves by 
other means, even in the most favorable cases, than that 
of a husband ; and what concerns some Magdalen asy- 
lums, in great Magdalen cities, no man desirous of mar- 
rying would accept from them, as from a wedding-office, 
his wedded half, properly but a kind of broken fragment. 
Perhaps this consideration excuses the conduct of the 
world, which regards the errors of men but as the chick- 
en-pox, which leaves few or no marks behind ; but those 
of women as the small-pox, w^hich imprints its traces on 
the recovered patient, at least on the general remem- 
brance. 

9 M 



194 LEVAXA. 

The purer the golden vessel, the more readily is it 
bent : the higher worth of women is sooner lost than that 
of men. According to the old German rural custom, the 
sons walked to church behind the father, but the daugh- 
ters before the mother, apparently because the latter 
should not be much left out of sight. 

Nature herself has surrounded these delicate souls with 
an ever-present, inborn guard, with modesty, both in 
sj^eaking and hearing. A woman requires no figure of 
eloquence — herself excepted — so often as that of accis' 
mus.* Keep watch over this guard, and pursue by this 
indication of nature the ^vay to education. On this ac- 
count, mothers, fathers, men, and even youths, are their 
best companions ; on the contrary, girls connected with 
other girls of a similar age, as in schools, provoke one 
another to an exchange of foibles, rather than of excel- 
lences, to a love of dress, admiration, and gossip, even to 
the forgetting of accismus. Even sisters of unequal age 
injure one another ; how much more, then, similar-aged 
playfellows : one needs only to listen to the mutual teas- 
ing among the members of a girls' school, when per- 
chance a young man has entered, or even approached, 
the door. In the paternal dwelling little would be made 
of such a circumstance, because it would happen more 
frequently with perfect seriousness, and among fewer 
rivals. And what may still be said about these despotic 
interim-convents ? Men are made for society, but women 
for maternal solitude. A boys' school is right, but not a 
girls' ; just as a ship of war filled with women would be 
merely a castle in the air, from its requiring so much 
unity, quickness, punctuality, and obedience. Girls de- 

* So rhetoricians term the figure by which one speaks, Avithout all 
longing, of the very objects for which the strongest desire is felt. 



EDUCATION OF GIRLS. 195 

pend upon one heart, bojs on many heads. The most 
that a girl could find in a school would be a second 
mother ; but the father would be wanting. 

Another thing which a mother should carefully guard 
against can scarcely be avoided in a girls' school. It is, 
that as a mistress rules and speaks ; for a master would 
speak quite differently : and as rude, violent, dull-minded 
girls, must be mingled with gentle, delicate, and suscep- 
tible ones, the bad must be cured by means of many 
punishments which are poison to the best. I mean this : 
nothing so roughly brushes the tender auricula dust, or 
flower-pollen, off the minds of girls, as that old-maidish 
cry of alarm at our sex : that prudish abuse of a sex from 
which every one must make an exception in favor of her 
father and her husband. There is a kind of bad, unspirit- 
ual modesty, which resembles the stone veil in a statue 
of modesty by A. Corradini, which, according to Volk- 
man, hangs down from it clearly and separately as 
another body. There are certain precipices along which 
women, like mules in Switzerland, must not be led if 
they are not to fall. Definite warnings against them 
serve as attractions and lures. Let the parents shine 
before them as pure examples, and they will not need to 
strengthen modesty, the wing-covers of Psyche's wings, 
with extra coverings. By instruction a child is robbed, 
in the first instance, of her innocent want of shame, after- 
wards of its silent presence. 

What follows is true, though in a lesser degree, of 
other schools besides those for girls; namely, if, in the 
parental dwelling, educational precept is lost in practice, 
and the child, to the unspeakable advantage of his feeling 
of freedom, and his quicker susceptibility, receives all 
moral instruction only as the natural, unobtrusive accom- 



196 LEVANA. 

paniment of his thread of life ; in a school, on the oon- 
trarv, the child feels as if life only served for instruction, 
as if he himself lay like a block of marble, chisels and 
hammers passing over him in every direction, from which 
so much was to be hewn away tha£ a grown-up man 
should, at last, rise from the block. The secret parental 
formation, under which the child believed himself to be 
growing of his own accord, stands here revealed in its 
naked aim ; he feels his carnation buds opened with a 
penknife, not gently disclosing themselves, after warm 
rain, by their own native force. For this very reason a 
young creature would scarcely wish to remain longer 
than the appointed time in the school-house, but would 
gladly live forever in its parent's home. 

Somewhat better than girls' boarding-schools are day- 
schools, places where they merely receive instruction. It 
were to be w^ished that in both of these, as well as in the 
girls' room at home, there could be more womanly class- 
spirit inspired, more love and reverence for their own sex, 
and woman's excellence shown as w^ell as the more bril- 
liant advantages of men. Tiiis leads me to a disinclina- 
tion not sufficiently struggled against in girls' schools, — 
I mean that of women towards women. 

When Kichardson had put every means of torture, or 
passion, which such a preying shark hides under his skull 
to use against women sufferers, into the head of that devil 
towards women, Lovelace, against the angel Clarissa; 
and when he really permitted this holy virgin to be cruci- 
fied by him, he could naturally only expect tl.At women 
would take the part of the sufferer, not of the beast of 
prey; but, to his utter astonishment, every day's post 
brought him letters from women entreating the linal hap- 
piness of the good Lovelace, just as Klopstoek received 



EDUCATION OF GIRLS. 197 

similar ones for the reformation of his Abadonna. Much 
the same befell a converter of the heathen in Greenland ; 
who, after having employed, as he hoped, every admitted 
power of eloquence to depict the burning heat of hell, 
saw, to his astonishment, an ever-increasing cheerfulness 
in the faces of the Greenlanders ; until at last, on de- 
scending from the pulpit, he learned that, by his warm 
description of hell, he had excited a special longing in the 
whole congregation to go thither as to a milder climate. 
vSuch a charming hell was Lovelace to women, although a 
purgatory to Clarissa. 

It almost sounds like satire to say that women are not 
particularly fond of each other, and that, with all their 
friendly words to one another, they rather imitate the 
nightingale, which, in Beckstein's opinion, aims by its 
luring tones to scare other nightingales ; and so the asser- 
tion of the schoolman, that they would rise up as men at 
the last day, may be in some measure confirmed by the 
nature of heaven, in which, as the abode of eternal love, 
women changed into men would naturally and more 
readily feel a universal love by the entire absence of their 
own sex. Moreover, we possess the facts that the an- 
cient Roman women (according to Bottiger's Sabina) 
manifested a degree of cruelty towards their female 
slaves, and European women in the Indies also towards 
theirs ; and the most ancient governing sister on the 
island of Lesbos towards her other sisters, and even 
towards their mothers; and, finally, modern mistresses 
towards their maid-servants ; to which our conduct to- 
wards our male domestics forms a noble contrast, so that 
we bear away, to our astonishment, (for we often flog ser- 
vants,) the honorable name of the gentler sex. I only 
passingly mention calumniation, or the " doi'^ t) death 



198 LEVANA. 

by evil tongues," Avhcreby a parlor is converted into a 
canvassing society of the lieads and hearts of such fore- 
doomed women as are not there drinking tea. 

Should we not, then, seriously exclaim, " O mother ! 
above all other things, implant and cherish in your daugh- 
ter a love and reverence for her own sex. Is it possible 
that you cannot succeed in so doing, if you show her the 
crown of noble women shining gloriously amid the dark- 
ness of past ages ; the elevating examples of united 
female friends ; and the relationship of all their sex's sis- 
ters with them in worth and in danger; and the thought 
that in her sex each honors or despises the sex of her 
mother ; and the certainty that, as hatred of humanity is 
punished in misanthropes, so the half of that sin, towards 
half the human race, will be punished in the haters of 
women?" Even the father may contribute his share, 
and indeed the largest, towards this end, by not merely 
preaching to his daughter, but showing her more regard 
towards her sisters, as the mother also may show more 
love. And, since no precept insures the practice of any 
virtue, it were well if the daughter were accustomed to 
regard in maid-servants not merely their common human- 
ity, but their fellowship with her in sex. 

§92. 

Some of the modern aesthetic lithologists would gladly 
see female flowering plants converted into petrifactions : 
they ought, say they, to repose more fully on the rights 
of the stronger. First, however, it were to be M'ished 
that more wood and kernel were imparted to the present 
soft, spongy character of men ; when that is effected, the 
woman will enclasp it like an ivy plant and form its 
second crown. How strong in wi 'J women are is a ques- 



EDUCATION OF GIRLS. I99 

tion to be asked, not of lover>, but of such husbands as, 
on their wedded penitential stools, are summoned to So- 
cratic discourses witli a female Socrates, or to such as 
Job's wife held. In the love before marriage the girl 
appears too weakly, characterless, and submissive ; but 
marriage, in accordance with her destination for children, 
suddenly opens, like a northern sun, all her blossoms, be 
they those of an aloe or of a thistle. Is it on this ac- 
count that most Slavonians * call their beloved, as the 
Poles, indeed, do all women, the uncertain? In short, 
the girl matures into the mother; and the man who wishes 
to possess in his wife at once a slave and a goddess stands 
half discomfited by the change ; the little that he can say 
on the matter consists in such ideas as these rather than 
anything else : " He had, trusting in his own steadfast- 
ness, lovingly proposed to himself to have been a prop to 
her ; but she had brought with her and packed up for use 
so much of her own, that subsequently, between man and 
wife, the sex was as difficult to distinguish as in young 
birds ; which was god, which goddess, was, in his own 
case, as hard to guess as in the early Grecian statues of 
deities : indeed, it were to be wished that the similarity 
were less absolute." 

Consequently the will of girls is less to be strengthened 
than bent and polished. Like plastic divinities, women 
should only gentl}^ and mildly express tbeir feelings. 
Every outward and inward excess is a blemish in their 
charms, a poison to their children. Even a man chooses 
gentleness as the first, though perhaps not the second, 
mode of expressing his will and determination. No mere 
strength goes to war against feminine gentleness ; so the 
tranquil moonshine is rarely broken by a storm, though 
* See Anton's Essays on the Slavonians. Vol. I. 



200 LEVANA. 

the glowing sunshine may be. From the moment ip 
which the bravest man shall speak in the gentlest manner 
will sweetness and compliance arise more and more in 
the strongest woman : she may continue to be a pyramid, 
but in the pyramids is found a soft echo. • 

Since the present warlike age and present style of 
German poetry send women less to the flute-school of 
gentleness than to the fighting-school of war, a few sen- 
tences added to this ninety-second section, which, though 
not bringing cure, may yet possibly avert the evil, will not 
be useless, at least to those daughters who add their ow^n 
character as a female water-pipe to our present tempest- 
uous season. 

Passionateness in a woman's soul is often found united 
with all the overflowing fulness of a deep, noble heai't, yes, 
even with predominant gentleness and affection; — and 
yet such a hard adjunct of nature may draw the being 
herself, and all who love or are loved by her, into the 
most irremediable misfortunes. 

The usually tranquil female character is naturally so 
much inclined to whirlwinds of passion, that even the laws 
(those of Prussia, for instance), dreading the angels of 
destruction in these otherwise mild angels, forbid an 
apothecary to sell poison to any woman, whereas they 
permit violent men to procure it. The laws seem usually 
to consider them as snow-w^hite, snow-dazzling, and snow- 
cold Ileclas full of fire. If, now, this naturally over- 
powerful disposition of the sex be increased by that of the 
individual, we behold a thunder-goddess, who beats down 
with waterspouts her little flower-children, not to mention 
her drenched husband, flooded house, and drowned love. 
A storming mother is a contradiction in education, and re- 
sembles those tropical s'orms which injuriously increase 



EDUCATION OF GIRLS. 201 

the temporatiire of tlie atmosphere ; whereas a storming 
father coohnglj purifies the air. To tlie child, yet stand- 
ing on his pure, clear heights, passion perhaps sounds as 
A'eak as does a crasli to one ascending lofty mountains ; 
but in the valleys of future life it becomes a thunder-clap, 
and every fit of maternal passion returns as a sevenfold 
echo in the married life of her daughter. As I have 
above said, I do not refer to conjugal love, in which, dur- 
ing these female hurricanes, the thin axle of Aphrodite's 
fair car breaks, or her yoked doves tear themselves loose 
and fly away, because the readers do not here require the 
poison to be shown them, but its antidote. 

This, however, is not so close at hand, as our discourse 
is only of girls six or seven years old. But to oppose 
violence to violence, to attack passion by passion, is to try 
to put out fire with boiling oil : punishments, especially 
on this account in youth, do more injury than the stifling 
of the flames warrants ; to which must be added that 
punishment, as is natural, only then affects the passion 
when it has provided the match for a still greater future 
one. Every repetition of the fault becomes, in this case, 
a doubling of it, to which even the furrows of pain act as 
inflammatory incitements. As a physical remedy, one 
might advise more vegetable than animal diet, and that 
of a cooling nature, if afterwards advancing years with 
their fiery blood would not again produce heat. But the 
best means to use against it in early life are the preven- 
tion of all, even the smallest, occasions for it, or sparks for 
the match : and, on the other hand, let every power of love, 
of patience, of peacefulness, be cherished and manifested 
and employed against that consuming fire. Commands 
effect nothing ; but examples of gentleness, whether given 
or related in tone and action, do all. The children of 
9* 



202 LEVANA. 

Quakers are gentle without punishment ; they see theif 
parents ever shining, as tranquil white stars, through the 
stormy clouds of foreign environment. 

On the contrary, in the later years of refle-ction, and the 
blush of shame, this punishment may be permitted, in- 
deed ordained ; that such a female Boreas of fifteen years 
old may, in the midst of her roaring storm, openly and 
harshly receive the metaphorical blow in the face on her 
burning, swollen cheeks, which, given previously, without 
its figurative meaning, would only, as I have already said, 
have increased the whole swelling evil. 



o 



§93. 

The wife of a nobleman was formerly called housewife. 
The ancient Britons were often led to battle by brave 
women. Many Scandinavian women, according to Home, 
were pirates. A North American on the land, and a 
Parisian woman in the shop, do everything that with us 
devolves on the man. Should it, indeed, be sufficient if a 
girl can sew, and knit, and net ? When Sweden, under 
Charles the Twelfth, had sent forth all her men at the 
call of glory, the women became postmasters, cultivators 
of the land, and overseers of the public offices. And since 
it may possibly happen in time that all the men may be 
engaged in a war and peace establishment, it seems to me 
we should think more of educating girls to be the conduc- 
tors of our business, and the managers of our estates ; for, 
subsequently, if the men were killed, there might be 
another conscription and enlisting demanded from the 
women than that under husbands. 

The gymnastics of life and labor are, if the two former 
sections be correct, the third commandment in female 
education. But these do not consist of so-called lady-like 



EDUCATION OF GIRLS. 203 

occupations. Sewing, knitting, or spinning with a Paris- 
ian pocket spinning-wheel are recreation and repose 
from labor, not labor and exercise ; for that spinning 
while walking, as the Moldavians do,* at least must be 
ordered. Worsted work, this female mosaic-work, more 
suitable for the higher classes, who must refresh them- 
selves from doing nothing by doing little, easily converts 
tlie pattern into a covering for mdisposition or ill-humor. 
Xenophon tells us that Lycurgus sent the Spartan women 
to the public places of exercise, and only the slaves to 
the embroidery-frame and the spinning-wheel. I do not 
reckon as greatest those physical disadvantages, the slav- 
ish carriage of the person, for instance, which need a 
dancing-school to correct what the sewing-school has 
done, for a watchful mother might as easily enforce cor- 
rect sitting during the sewing-lesson, as a writing-master 
can do during the writing-lesson ; neither do I reckon 
the nerve-enfeebling, finger-pricking irritation of knitting ; 
and the physical evils of a sedentary life shall be treated 
of hereafter. But m.ost employments of the fingers by 
whicli you attempt to fix the female quicksilver have this 
injurious effect, that the mind, left to idleness, rusts away, 
or is entirely given up to the waves of circle after circle 
spreading fiincy. Sewing and knitting needles, for in- 
stance, keep open the wounds of an unhappy attachment 
far more than do all romances : they are thorns which 
themselves pierce the falling rose. If the young woman 
have, as the young man generally has, some occupation 
whicli every moment demands new thought, the old one 
cannot perpetually stand out in the most prominent light. 
A change of occupation is especially adapted to the 
female character, as the steady pursuit of one is to that 
of the man. 

* SuiTinrnkofTT's Travel? \u th'^ Crimen. 



204 LEVANA. 

Distraction, forgctfulness, want of consideration, and 
presence of mind, are the first and worst consequences of 
this sweet internal and external /ar niente ; and a woman 
needs nothing more to poison the holy trinity of wedlock, 
child, husband, and self. Heavens ! how a young man 
must every day draw his thread of life from a new fleece, 
or conduct his plans on their long journey nearer to the 
goal, while a young woman repeats yesterday in to-day as 
the image of to-morrow ; he indeed walks, and she sits ; 
the one is permitted to stand, the other only to sit. 

The female sex has such a preference for every an- 
choring manner of life, that it would gladly, as Gerning 
says the Greek women actually did, carry a camp-stool 
with it, so as after every step to have a seat ready at 
hand. Yet I should think women might be satisfied to 
resemble the sun in its shining and warming powers, and 
not also in its immovableness. They, in common with 
the sitting professions, tailoring and shoemaking, are the 
victims of spleen and fanaticism. This sedentary life, 
full of noontide rests, morning and afternoon rests, and 
vesper rests, in which great ladies with full tables and 
stomachs indulge, gives so much trouble to the doctors, 
running hither and thither, that finally a knowledge of 
medicine will be as necessary as a knowledge of French 
to every chevalier dlionneur, and chamberlain. In such 
a circle one certainly need seek few Swiss heroines, not to 
mention that Szekleress from the district of Gyergyoer, 
who, in a battle wath the Moldavians, killed seven of them 
at one stroke, and in the evening returned and was 
brought to bed of a son. This circumstance happened 
on the seventh of September, 1685. 

A certain Quoddensvult, in the (yet unv)rinted) twenty- 
third volume of the Flegeljahre, thinks ro excuse some- 



EDUCATION OF GIRLS. 205 

thing, when, after having spoken of the female love of 
sitting and dancing, until he hit upon those hovering flies 
which hover unwaveringly, and shoot down swift as ar- 
rows, he thus expresses himself concerning it : "I see 
why the female nature loves rest better than men do, less 
in crabs — of which the female has much the fewer legs 
under its tail — than in the human foetus itself, for the 
boy begins to move in the third, the girl in the fourth 
month. Also in the Culs de Paris is the sitting mode of 
life sufficiently exemplified. But Nature softens this as 
much as she does other things, by giving a desire for sour 
kraut and herrings as a curative diet to fever patients; so 
she implanted in the bed and sofa lying woman, as well as 
in the lazy savage, the love of dancing. As in a concert, 
so in her, prestissimo follows adagio. I know not what is 
more necessary to the present Largo di molto sitting than 
the bop furioso. A ball is a strengthening snail and oyster 
cure of crawling snails and sitting oysters ; a thee dansant 
is the best cure for a tea-drinking. The two medical fin- 
gers tread on the foot as ten medical toes; and at a masked 
ball the uncovered lady has her pestilence preserver in 
her hand, as the plague doctors formerly went about in 
wax masks. If you want ladies to go faster than posts 
and couriers, arrange an English country dance between 
Leipsic and Dessau, and let the girls ' chassez,' then see 
who arrives first, the post or the dancers,'* — and so on. 
For, however true some of it may be, it is yet better placed 
where it is, in the twenty-third volume. 

This love of sitting also attacks the lesser branches of 
family and household affaii-s, in which women often permit 
and neglect matters mei*ely not to have to rise from their 
seats, or unwillingly purchase the exercise of their chil- 
dren with their own, or willingly delay physical and force 



2o6 LEVANA. 

mental growth. In London ringing twice summons the 
footman, thrice the chambermaid, apparently to give time 
to the sex. 

§94. 

Now how can this be obviated ? Just as it is obviated 
among the lower classes/" Let a girl, instead of her dreamy, 
monotonous finger-work, manage the business of the house- 
hold, which every moment restrains dreaminess and ab- 
sence of mind by new duties, and calls on the attention ; 
in early years let her be employed in everything, from 
cooking to gardening ; when older, from the management 
of the servants to keeping the accounts. WVhat a minister 
is in a small state, that a woman is in her lesser state ; 
namely, the minister of all departments at once, the hus- 
band managing the foreign affairs ; more especially is she 
the minister of finance, who, in the state, according to 
Goethe, in the last resort, regulates peace, as well as, 
according to Archenholz, the magazines of war. Even 
noble ladies would be healthier and happier if they fulfilled 
the duties of maitre dliolel^ and femme de charge, I mean 
for the house : I know they frequently act in both capa- 
cities for their husbands. Certainly, as a whole, the females 
of the higher classes are rendered more delicately beautiful 
by this absolute idleness; but such a Venus resembles that 
of Rome, who was also the goddess of corpses ; among 
these may be reckoned her children, her husband, or her- 
self. I do not speak about the art of cookery, in orde^* 
not to be laughed at as Kant was, who wished that here 
(as in Scotland) regular lessons should be given in it as 
well as in dancing. Rather will Seneca's beautiful words 
addressed to sacrificers — " Puras Deus, non plenas ad- 
spicit manus" (God regards pure, not full hands) — ac- 
quire a new meaning with noble ladies ; and they will 



EDUCATION OF GIRLS. 207 

suppose their husbands value pure white hands more 
than those which present them some good dish they have 
cooked. 

But how is it that in the order of female rank her real 
title, housewife, is not esteemed higher ? Is it not in that 
capacity that as once physically, so now financially, she 
prepares a freer future for her children ? And can a 
woman find that in detail beneath her regard, in which, as 
a whole, the greatest of men, a Cato of Utica, a Sully, and 
Others, sought their glory ? Once for all, the household 
must be managed in some way ; and is it better that the 
husband should add this extra weight to his out-of-door 
duties ? If so, I should merely be lost in astonishment 
that the women — for the thing is practicable, as Hum- 
boldt and others have seen examples of it among the men 
in South America — do not commit to our charge the 
reasonable and easy duty of suckling the children. After 
a little creative practice there might be, instead of wet 
female, wet male nurses : the ministers, presidents, and 
other principals (the children carried after them into 
court) would stand it better than the women, &c., &c. 
For the rest, let no more flighty than intellectual woman 
declare that housekeeping, as a mechanical affair, is be- 
neath the dignity of her mind, and she would rather be as 
mentally happy as a man. Is there, then, any mental 
work without hand work? Do accountants' offices, secre- 
taries' rooms, the military parade, places of the state, set 
the hands less in motion than the kitchen and household 
affair^, or is it merely that they do so in a different way ? 
Can the mind show itself earlier, or otherwise, than behind 
the mask of the laborious body ? for instance, the ideal of 
the sculptor otherwise than after millions of blows and 
chisel-strokes on the marble? Or can this present Levana 



2o8 LEVANA. 

appear in the world and in print, unless I make pens, dip 
them in the ink, and draw them up and down ? 

Ye holy women of German antiquity ! ye knew as little 
of an ideal heart as of the circulation of the pure blood 
which flushed and warmed you when you said, " I do it 
for my husband, for my children " ; you, with your anxie- 
ties and cares, seeming only subordinate and prosaic! But 
the holy ideal descended through you, as heaven's fire 
through clouds, upon the earth. The mystic Guyon, who 
in a hospital took on himself, and fulfilled, the duties of a 
loathing maid-servant, has a higher throne among glorified 
souls than the general who, with the arms of others, yea, 
and with his own, makes wounds which he does not heal. 
All strength lies within, not without ; and whether a poet 
on his printed sheet, or a conqueror on his missives and 
treaty-papers, divide and unite countries, the difference is 
only externally so great as that between all and nothing : 
I mean to the vulgar. 

§95. 

Women are by nature intended for people of business : 
they are called to it by the equal balance of their powers 
and their keen sense of observation. Children require an 
ever-open eye, but not an ever-open mouth : claude os, 
apcri oculos. But what circle of talking, which always 
encloses only small and trifling relations, could so well 
exercise that ever-present glance as the circle of domestic 
affairs ? Boys destined for certain occupations, to be ar- 
tists, professors, or mathematicians, may dispense with a 
capacity for business, but never a girl who will marry, — > 
especially one of the above-mentioned boys. Above all 
things, must that wandering, or absence of mind, be 
strictly combated, which is no fault of nature, but solely 



EDUCATION OF GIRLS. 20g 

of the individual, and is never the determining condition 
of any superior power. Every dissipation of mind is 
partial weakness. For instance, were the poet or philoso- 
pher, who wanders about so absently in the outer world, 
which is foreign to his sphere of action, to work with 
equal want of reflection in his inner world, which alone 
he has to observe and govern, he would certainly be 
either mad or useless. The same thing is true in the op- 
posite case ; if a woman, indifferent to the outer, practical 
world in which her business Kes, neglects it for the sake 
of the inner. If, now, a girl is intended to grow up with 
a clear eye for everything round her, — if she is not to 
waste her many eyes in company, as Argus did his, by 
misplacing them as painted eyes in a peacock's tail ; or 
if she is not, like that sea fish, the turbot, to have two 
eyes on the right side, bnt, in compensation-, to be blind 
on the left, — let her be many-sidedly exercised in house- 
hold affairs; and the parents must not be disturbed if 
some admirer of an ethereal bride should object to her, as 
Plato reproached Eudoxus, with having profaned pure 
mathematics by applying them to mechanics ; for to-day 
or to-morrow the wedding comes, and the husband^ the 
honeymoon being past, kisses the mother's hand for all 
that the daughter does contrary to his expectation. 

§ 96. 

Let everything be taught a girl which forms and ex- 
ercises the habit of attention, and the power of judging 
things by the eye. Consequently, botany, — this inex- 
haustible, tranquil, ever-interesting science, attaching the 
mind to nature with bonds of flowers. Then astmnomy, 
not the properly mathematical, but the Lichtenbergian 
and religious, which with the expansion of the universe 



2IO LEVANA. 

expands the mind, along with which it does no harm if a 
girl exj)eriences w^hy a longest night is advantageous to 
sleep, a full moon to love. I should also even recommend 
mathematics! but here, unfortunately, women who have 
a Fontenelle for astronomy, h^ve not one for mathemat- 
ics ; for, with regard to girls, I only mean those simplest 
principles of pure and mixed mathematics which boys can 
understand. And geometry itseltj as a second eye, or 
dioptric line, w^hich brings as distinct separations into the 
world of matter as Kant has done by his categories into 
the world of mind, may also be commenced early ; for 
geometrical observations, unlike philo.-ophical, strain the 
mind to the injury of the body as little as the external 
sense of sight. \ Sculptors and painters study mathematics 
as the skeleton of visible beauty, without injury to their 
sense of beauty : I know a little girl of two years and a 
half old, who recognized in the full foliage of nature the 
dry paper skeleton of the mathematical figures which she 
had learned to draw in play. In tlie same way these 
little beings have early developed powders of calculation, 
especially for the important part of mental arithmetic. 
"VVliy are they not also tauglit a multiplication-table for 
the reduction of the various kinds of money and yard 
measurements ? 

Philosophy is something quite different, indeed, diamet- 
rically opposite. Why should these lovers of wisdom and 
of wise men learn it ? A lottery-ticket with a great pre- 
mium has been occasionally drawn from among this sex 
— a true-born poetess; but a philoso})lieress would have 
broken up the lottery. A woman of genius — INIadame 
Chatelet — may understand Newton in English, and ren- 
der him into French ; but none could do that in German 
for Kant or Schelling. The most spiritual-minded an-^ 



EDUCATION OF GIRLS. 211 

intellectual women have a way of their own, a certainty 
of understanding the most profound pliilosophers, which 
even tiieir very scholars despairingly aim at, — namely, 
tliey find everything easy, especially their own thoughts, 
that is, feelings. In the ever-changing atmosphere of 
their fancy they meet with every most finely-drawn skel- 
eton of the philosophers ; just like many poetical follow- 
ers of the new schools of philosophy, who, instead of a 
clearly defined circle, give us a fantastic circle of vapor. 

Geography, as a mere registry of places, is utterly 
worthless for mental development, and of little use to 
women in their vocations ; on the contrary, that is indis- 
pensable which, teaching the enduring living history of 
the earth, — in opposition to that which is transitory and 
dead, — is at once the history of humanity, which divides 
itself into nations as well as into contemporaneous historic 
periods, and also that of the globe itself, which converts 
the twelve months into twelve contemporaneous spaces. 
The mind of a girl attached to her chair and her birth- 
place, like an enchanted princess in a castle, must be 
delivered and led forth to clearer prospects by the de- 
scriptions of travellers. I wish some one would give us 
a comprehensive selection of the best travels and voyages 
round the world, but shortened and adapted for the use 
of girls ; and, if the editor were well furnished with Her- 
der's patience and insight into the most dissimilar nations, 
I know of no more valuable present to the sex. With 
regard to descriptions of places, every station requires a 
different one, — a merchant's daughter one very unlike 
that provided for a princess. 

Almost all this equally applies to petrified history, 
which only conducts from ono past age into another. 
For a girl it can scarcely be too barren in dates and 



212 LEVANA. 

names. How many emperors in the whole history of 
German emperors are for a girl ? On the other hand, it 
cannot be sufficiently rich in great men and great events, 
which elevate the soul above the petty histories of towns 
and suburbs. 

IMusic, vocal and instrumental, is natural to the female 
mind, and is the Orphean lute which leads her uninjured 
past many siren sounds, and accompanies her with its 
echo of youth far into the autumn of wedded life. 
Drawing, on the contrary, if carried beyond the first 
principles, which educate the eye and taste in dress more 
perfectly, steals too much time from the husband and 
children ; therefore it is usually a lost art. 

One foreign language is necessary, and at the same time 
quite enough for the scientific explanation of her own. 
Unfortunately French pushes itself most prominently for- 
ward, because a woman really must learn it to comply 
with the necessities consequent on the billeting of French 
soldiers. I would wish — why should one not wish, that 
is, do every day of the year what one does on the first ? 
— that a selection of English, Italian, Latin words were 
placed before every girl as an exercise in reading, so 
that she might understand when she heard them. 

The talking and writing world has sent into circula- 
tion so large a foreign treasury of scientific words, that 
girls, who do not, like boys, learn the words along with 
the sciences, should have weekly lessons in them out of 
a scientific dictionary, or translate into comprehensible 
phrases tales in which such anti-Campean words are pur- 
j)osely employed. I wish that for this end an octavo 
volume full of foreign words, with an explanatory ency- 
clopaedia to them, were published. The best women read 
dreaming (the rest truly sleeping) ; they pass gliding as 



EDUCATION OF GIRLS. 213 

easily over the mountains of a metaphysical book, as 
sailors do over the mountainous waves of the ocean. 
None of them ever thinks of asking the dictionary, nay, 
not even her husband, what any word means ; but this 
vow of silence, which regards asking questions as a for- 
bidden game, this contentment with dark thoughts, whicli 
possibly learns in the twentieth book the meaning of a 
scientific term used in the second, ought to be prevented. 
Else they will read books as they listen to men. 

There is one charm which all girls might possess, and 
whicli frequently not one in a provincial town does pos- 
sess ; which equally enchants him who has, and him who 
has it not ; which adorns the features and every word, and 
which remains imperishable (nothing can exist longer) 
while a woman speaks ; — I mean the pronunciation itself, 
the pure German indicating no birthplace. I entreat you, 
mothers, to take lessons in pure German enunciation and to 
rehearse them constantly with your daughters. I assure 
you — to place the matter on a firmer foundation — that 
a vulgar pronunciation always rather reminds one of a 
vulgar condition, because, in general, the higher the rank 
the better is the pronunciation, though not always the 
language. The higher ranks, contrary to Adelung's 
change of words, are not the best musical artists of lan- 
guage (composers), but they are the best deliverers of it 
(virtuosi). 

Girls, unlike authoresses, cannot write too much. It is 
•ew though on paper, this final metamorphosis of their dear 
flax, they themselves experienced one, and, in the back- 
ward viewing of the rough and smooth external world, 
won space and rest for their own inner world ; so often in 
letters and diaries do we find women, the most ordinary 
in conversation, reveal an unexpected spiritual heaven. 



214 LEVANA. 

But the theme on which and for which they write muf I 
not be one drawn from a learned caprice, but from the 
observation of life, — for their sensations and thoughts 
depend upon chmate far more than tliose of boys ; of 
(bourse I ypeak of real letters, and their own diaries, not 
"nere exercises. From this cause — that an appointed 
goal marked and restrained their course — the author has 
received so many eloquent, profound, and brilliant letters 
•from feminine, nay, masculine minds, that he has often 
exclaimed in vexation, " If only five authoresses wrote as 
''^ell as twenty lady letter-writers, or twenty authors as 
"H^^U as forty correspondents, literature would be of some 

§97. 

Tho greatest part of the above will help to form 
.^emale power in connection with female mind, activity 
fJong with gentleness : not only in marriage, but in the 
■woman herself, ought there to be a reflection of that 
heavenly zodiac in which the lion shines beside the 
virgin. Intelle^^t ftcts democratically on the mind ; feel- 
ip^, monarchically. Any circumstance, even dressing 
for a ball, seizes on a woman, like the Romans on the 
Sabiaes, ^and tears her from her inner world. One who 
before the toilet for the ball can think of anything better, 
loses many more inches of mental elevation. The pres- 
ent govern*^ none more poAverfully with one single idea 
than mind'^ whio.h step dazzled out of their little dream- 
cell into the oleAr daylight. 

On this U groimdecl the well-known experience, that 
they are never rendv tm it is too late, and have always 
forgotten something. But how ea-^^y wer^ it to «iend a 
daughter every vfoeh mto the str'»ggling school of im- 
provemeht! Let \ae -aiher .sav, *^ U^■a.r Nanny, "'S'annj' 



EDUCATION OF GIRLS. 215 

or Annie, if you are readj dressed in one hour, you 
shall dance to-day." In a similar way he might cure 
them of forge tf Illness and want of punctuality by pleas- 
ure parties, as stipulated rewards for immediate ces- 
sation from their occupations and quick packing up of 
all necessaries. 

§98. 

There is just as much to be said against the vanity 
of women as against the pride of men ; that is, just as 
little. Charms, which like flowers, lie on the surface 
and always glitter, easily produce vanity ; hence women, 
wits, players, soldiers, are vain, owing to their presence, 
figure, and dress. On the contrary, other excellences, 
which lie deep down like gold, and are only discovered 
with difficulty, strength, profoundness of intellect, mo- 
rality, leave their possessors modest and proud. Nelson 
could become just as vain by orders and the loss of his 
eye and arm, as proud by his cool bravery. No man 
can with sufficient liveliness place himself in the position 
of a beautiful woman, who, carrying her nose, her eyes, 
her figure, her complexion, as sparkling jewels through 
the streets, blinds one eye after another with her daz- 
zling brilliance, and risks no capital in exchange for 
her profits. On the other hand, like a man chained 
and imprisoned, the very clever and learned rector 
creeps behind her, covering his inner pearls with two 
thick shells ; and no one knows w^hat he knows, but 
the man himself alone must admire and dazzle himself. 

The desire to please with some good quality, which 
rules only in the visible or external kingdom, is so inno- 
cent and right, that the opposite, to be indifferent or 
disagreeable to the eye or ear, would even be wrong, 



2i6 LEVANA. 

Whj should a painter dress to please the eye, and not 
his wife ? — I grant you there is a poisonous vanity 
and love of approbation ; that, namely, -which lowers the 
inner kingdom to an outer on-e, spreads out sentiments 
as snaring nets for the eye and ear, and degradingly 
buys and sells itself with that which has real inherent 
value. Let a girl try to please with her appearance 
and her dress, but never with holy sentiments ; a so- 
called fair devotee, who knew that she was so, and 
therefore knelt, would worship nothing save herself, the 
Devil, and her admirer. Every mother, and every friend 
of the family, should keep a careful watch over their 
own wish to praise, — often as dangerous as tliat to 
blame, — which so easily names and praises an uncon- 
scious grace in the expressions of the heart, in the mien, 
or in the sentiments, and thereby converts it forever into 
a conscious one ; that is to say, kills it The counting 
of his subjects lost them to David. The gold presented 
by demon hands vanishes when spoken of. While man 
finds a cothurnus on which to raise and show himself to 
the world in the judge's sea,t, literary rank, the profes- 
sor's chair, or the car of victory, woman has nothing 
save her outward appearance whereon to raise and dis- 
play her inner nature : why pull from under her this 
lowly footstool of Venus ? And as man stands in some 
college or corporate body, as in an assurance office for 
the maintenance of his honor, but woman only asserts 
the lonely worth of her own individuality, she must 
attach herself to it all the more strongly. Perhaps 
this is a second reason why women cannot endure modi- 
fied praise ; for the first is surely this, that from want of 
self-division, and owing to their constant subjection to 
the present, which always presents the bitter more power- 



EDUCATION OF GIRLS. 217 

f'llly thcan the sweet, tliey are more sensitive to the limits 
set to the praise tlian to the praise itself. 

We will now pass to the clothes-devil, as the old theo- 
logians formerly called the toilet. 

What else does a woman's dressing-room signify than 
the attiring- room of a theatre ? And why, then, are 
there so many sermons against it ? 

The preachers do not sufficiently bear m mind the 
following considerations : to a woman her dress is the 
third organ of the soul (the body is the second, and the 
brain the first), and every upper garment is one organ 
more. Why? Because the body, her true wedding- 
gift, is more completely one with her destination than 
ours is with ours : while ours is rather a pilgrim's or 
miner's dress with its protecting apron, hers is a coro- 
nation robe, a court suit. It is the holy relic of an 
invisible saint, which cannot be sufficiently worshipped 
and adorned ; and the touch of this holy body works all 
kinds of miracles. To cut off a man's hand was in 
early ages scarcely less dangerous than to touch a wo- 
man's, on which pressure the Salic law lays a fine of 
fifteen gold pieces ; a violent kiss formed the ground for 
a criminal indictment ; and in Hamburgh there is still 
a fine of twopence on every kiss imprinted in a work- 
shop. Hence dress and ornament must be as important 
to women as varnish to paintings ; they must regard 
them as a multiplication of their surfaces or facets. 
Hence for the most part women visit a " lying in state " 
to see how people look under the ground among the 
dead. Perhaps the love of dress may be among the 
causes of our having had great female painters, but no 
great female musicians; for a great space in women's 
pictures is filled with dress, but in music they think they 
10 



2 1 8 L E V A N A . 

cannot be sufficiently seen unless they sing. Hence, also, 
light falls on the female art of putting on a shawl of a 
Hamilton. Even in old age and on the sick-bed, of both 
■which a man takes advantage to make himself comfort- 
able in night-cap and dressing-gown, they still put on an 
ornamental costume, not to please men, but to please 
themselves : in the most secret coffin of the most lonely 
Carthusian convent of La Trappe they will not be behind 
the exhumed corpses of Pompeii, which advantageously 
display themselves to posterity in ornaments and ear- 
rings. If there were a Miss Robinson Crusoe on a deso- 
late island, with no one to please but her own reflection 
in the water, she would yet every day make and wear 
the newest fashions. How little they make themselves 
into artificial work and three-cased watches for the sake 
of men, may be seen in the fact that they never dress 
more carefully than for ladies' parties, where every one 
studies and vexes the rest. 

Unembarrassed by witnesses, each one places herself 
before her ideal world, — the mirror, — and dresses the 
bridal pair. Formerly, in France, every woman carried 
a glass on her person, apparently to be more agreeable 
to her friends, and to indemnify them by their own pic- 
tures for the bearer of them. In Germany, in olden 
time, a mirror w^as bound up with the hymn-books, — 
why is it not so now ? Pity that this loss of the divine 
image should be caused by the want of a looking-glass ! 

On this same ground of natural destination, not even 
the cleverest can pardon the censure of her personal ap- 
pearance ; she even values its praise more highly than 
that of her mind. From the time of Louis the Four- 
teenth, the French kings have sworn never to forgive two 
things, both perpetrable only between man and man, — 



EDUCATION OF GIRLS. 219 

the duel and something worse. "Women will willingly for- 
give all save one thing ; not, indeed, the denying of their 
charms, but the loud proclamation of some deformity or 
want of personal attractions. And every man's tongue 
which could affirm such a thing is immorally cruel. 
Woman, more subject to the sensuous present, to ap- 
pearance and opinion, than we are, must painfully feel 
her affirmed unsighthness to have, as her beauty has, a 
wide-extending influence. I should even consider this 
very speaking of it cruel, did I not know from my own 
experience, as well as from that of others, that a woman's 
lovely heart as completely effiices all external blots, as an 
unlovely one does all personal charms ; and that a fair 
soul has at most only the first moment, but a foul one the 
whole future, to dread. Woman's body is the pearl oys- 
ter ; whether this be brilliant and many-colored, or rough 
and dark from the place of its birth, yet the pure white 
pearl within alone gives it value. I mean by this thy 
heart, thou good maiden, thou who expectest not to be 
appreciated, but only to be misunderstood ! 

From the destination of women may possibly be de- 
rived the greater coldness and severity with which women 
of rank treat their female domestics ; they cannot conceal 
from themselves many resemblances and many possibili- 
ties of exchanged circumstances ; in which husbands, to 
whom more is attributed in the proposition of indiffer- 
ence than in that of contradiction, readily confirm them. 
Women, especially beauties, regard very little the differ- 
ence of mental cultivation ; men that only, in regard to 
their servants ; and Pompey, assured of his victory, did 
not ask whether his cook looked as he did. 

Woman's love of dress has, along with cleanliness, 
which dwells on the very borders between physical na- 



220 LEVANA. 

ture and moralityj a next-door neighbor in purity of 
heart. Why are all girls who go out to meet princes 
with addresses and flowers dressed in white ? The chief 
color of the mentally and physically pure Englishwomen 
is white. Hess found white linen most used in free 
countries ; and I find states all the more modest the freer 
they are. I will become no surety for the inner purity 
of a woman who, as a counterpart to the Dominicans, who 
wear white in the cloister, but black when abroad, only 
puts on the color of purity when walking in the streets. 

I might speak of the wardrobe, — the female library ; 
for our white cloth consists of black on white. I might 
also ask whether girls do not love clothes more on this 
account ; because they make many of them, and conse- 
quently enjoy all the more heartily a garment they have 
made in their own little summer-house. But the more 
immediate question is, how the water-shoots of a flower- 
ing branch ingrafted by nature are to be repressed or 
cut off. 

Animate the heart, and it no longer thirsts for common 
air, but for ether. No one is less vain than a bride. 
Mark out for your daughter any long course to some im- 
portant business, and she will look the seldomer about her. 
A true vork takes possession of the author as well as af- 
terwards of the reader, — neither thinks any more about 
himself. In a sea-fight, no Nelson is vain; in a land- 
fight, no Alcibiades; in a council of state, no Kaunitz. 

Let a daughter learn and exemplify the artistic charm 
of dress on other persons. 

Treat her as an artistic manikin, and lay the value on 
the product itself; she may then regard herself as an 
actress who does not become a queen by means of her 
dress. Costly clothes make much vainer tlian pretty nnes.X 



EDUCATION OF GIRLS. 221 

Do not permit nurses, ladies'-maids, and such-like 
locusts, to praise and deify the dressed-up girl : yes, even 
keep 1 sharp eye on her playfellows, especially those of 
lower rank ; because they readily lose their astonishment 
at the fine dress in admiration of the wearer. 

Ascribe to cleanliness, symmetry, propriety of dress, 
and all the aesthetic requisites of beauty, their brilliant 
and true worth ; so a daughter, like a poet, forgets her- 
self in her art and in her ideal, and her own beauty in 
what is beautiful. She will be a painter who paints her- 
self, — whom not the original, but the copy, charms. 
Finally, if the mothers are not their own incessant pur- 
veyors of fashionable dress, nor a fruitless tulip- bed of 
modish colors, much, if not all, is done for the daughters. 

§99. 
/ 1 could write a whole paragraph merely in favor of 
cheerfulness and merriment in girls, and dedicate it to 
motliers, wlio so frequently forbid them. \ But seriously to 
assure girls they may laugh on suitable occasions would 
look very much like presenting them an opportunity of 
doing so. Mothers have much a habit of grumbling, 
even though they may smile inwardly ; the daughters, 
on the contrary, generally only laugh visibly. The for- 
mer have passed out of the triumphant church of virgins 
into the church militant of matrons ; their growing duties 
have increased their seriousness ; the bridegroom is 
changed from a honey-bird, wdio invited them to the 
sweets of the honeymoon, into a resolute honey-hunting 
bear, who will himself have the honey. 

Then all the more, O mothers, grant these dear light- 
hearted beings their sports around the flowers ; their 
minute's play before long years of serious duties. Why 



222 LEVANA. 

may not with them, as with the Romans, comedy precede 
tragedy ? K the boy may be a zepliyr, why may not the 
girl be a zepyhrette ? Is there in the whole range of life 
anything so beautiful, so poetical, as the laughing and 
joking of a maiden who, still in the full harmony of all 
her powers, plays with everything in luxurious freedom, 
and neither mocks nor hates when she jests ? For girls, 
the antipodes of fish, which, as is well known, are not 
only deaf, but also possess no diaphragm, have and impart 
the true sportiveness of poetry, so dithcult for authors to 
imitate, so unlike satire and the humor of men. Their 
seriousness is rarely so innocent as their fun ; and still 
less innocent is that supercilious discontent which con- 
verts the virginal Psyche into a heavy, stupid, humming, 
wing-drooping motli, a death's-head, for instance. The 
melancholy night-flier may possibly please the lover ; but 
the husband requires his day Psyche, for marriage de- 
mands cheerfulness. In a certain Libyan people the 
young man married that girl among his guests who 
laughed at his jokes ; perhaps my meaning is contained 
in that custom. 

^Laughing cheerfulness throws sunlight on all the paths 
of life. Peevishness covers with its dark fog even the 
most distant horizon. Sorrow causes more absence of 
mind and confusion than so-called levity. If a woman 
can perform this comedy impromptu in married life, and 
occasionally enliven the serious epic of the hi\sband, or 
hero, by her amusing heroic ballads, or get up, as the 
Romans did, a merry farce against misfortunes, she will 
have bribed and w^on joy, and her husband, and her 
children. 

Never fear that feminine merriment precludes depth 
of soul and feehng. Does it do so in men? And did 



EDUCATION OF GIRLS. 2*23 

not the lawgiver Lycurgus, and his Spartans everywhere, 
build an altar in his house to Laughter ? It is precisely 
under external cheerfulness that the quiet powers of the 
heart increase and grow to their full stature. How heav- 
enly must it be, then, when for the first time the smihng 
face weeps for love, and the irrepressible tears mirror the 
whole gentle heart ! 

Wherefore, ye mothers, do not merely suffer, but assist, 
your daughters to become externally French girls, inter- 
nally German, and to convert life into a comic poem, 
which surrounds its deep meaning with merry forms. I 
know few books to recommend for this purpose — we 
men always think of these first when advice is to be 
given — besides the letters of the incomparable Sevigne. 
But wit, mere wit, is — in opposition to aesthetics — the 
comedy and humor of w^omen ; an epigram is to them a 
humorous chapter, a ITaug or a Martial, a Sterne or an 
Aristophanes. They will laugh themselves ill, or rather 
well, about the curious marriage of the great and little ; 
which only seems no mis-alliance to man surveying the 
long-connected chain of being. But laugh away! and 
may your mothers read you many epigrams ! I wish 
much there were a suitable selection of these for girls, 
and a few comic works written ex[)ressly for them, which 
would certainly sound very French ! Then let the dear, 
merry children laugh to their hearts' content among one 
another, and especially at any grave, pompous man who 
comes among them, even were he the author of this 
ninety-ninth paragraph. 

§ 100. 

Inquiries might still be made concerning the edu ation 
of women of genius, and one of a peculiar nature required 



224 LEVANA. 

for them. But I will only insist the more strongly oa 
the necessity of an ordinary one for them, which may act 
as the balance and counterpoise of their fancy. Genius — 
which with wonderful works as with holy festivals breaks 
into the common course of the week — cannot be learned, 
can be very httle taught, and not at all overcome ; and 
will boldly raise its brow above time and sex and every 
difficulty. Talent, not genius, can be repressed, that is, 
annihilated ; just as a compound can be destroyed, that is, 
decomposed, but not a simple power. And truly, were 
the repression of genius by circumstances possible, we 
should never once have experienced its existence. For 
then genius, always appearing only as the one intercalai-y 
day of many yeai'S, as one single day contradicting and 
voting against a majority of 1460 days, must have fallen 
a prey to the opposing tendencies of its age, — that is, to 
tendencies which, enslaving men from the earliest times, 
would bind them down to the latest, — as a horse to the 
multitudinous stings of bees. Nevertheless, genius has 
existed, for we have the word. They whom it inspired 
made, like other generals and monarchs of this world, 
separate treaties of peace with their neighbors, and only 
after death a general one with the whole world. 

But if a man of genius must also be a man and a citi- 
zen, and, if possible, a father too, a w^oman must not sup- 
pose herself elevated by her genius above her appointed 
day-labor in life. If a Jean Jacques write upon educa- 
tion, an intelligent Johanna Jacquelina need not be 
ashamed of the occupation of intelligent men ; on the 
contrary, the rare excess of female talent should rather 
be an additional call to education, than a passport for 
neglecting it. 

But if women are ever ashamed of acting up to the 



EDUCATION OF GIRLS. 225 

ideas on \vliich they pride themselves, their destiny 
avenges itself upon them justly and severely. 

First, Justlt/. For woman is appointed to be the Vesta, 
or vestal priestess, of home, — not the sea-nymph of the 
ocean. The fuller she is of an ideal perfection, the more 
must she endeavor to express it in reality ; as the ideal 
of all ideals — God — has manifested himself in the 
world ; she should educate a daughter as he educates 
the whole human race. If a poet can express his ideal 
as well in the narrow limits of the Dutch school as in 
the far horizon of the Italian, wherefore should she not 
be able to express hers in the kitchen, store-room, and 
nursery ? 

And, secondly, the punishment of the neglected rela- 
tions of life is severe, A woman can never forget to 
love, though she be a poet or a ruler. Then, instead of 
children, women of genius seek the society of men. By 
these they expect to be loved as women, though they 
themselves only love as men. So they, like flying-fish 
between the two elements, hover between manhood and 
womanhood, injured by both, and persecuted in both king- 
doms. They then become the more unhappy the wider 
their intellectual circle extends ; a poetess, for instance, 
becomes more so than a painter. 

But, if they unite their woman's destiny with genius, 
a mighty and rare blessedness fills their hearts ; the 
clouds which pour their floods in the valleys, gently 
dissolve on their heights as on mountain-tops. 

What is most to be desired for such heads is a crown, 
a prince's or a ducal coronet ; and this brings us t the 
next chapter. 

10* o 



226 LEVANA. 



CHAPTER V. 

PRIVATE INSTRUCTIONS OF A PRINCE TO THE GOVERNESS 
OP HIS DAUGHTER. 

§101. 

I^JERMIT me to embody in a dream the few thoughts 
I have to offer on the education of princesses. 
The dream of which I speak elevated me at once 
above all middle grades into the rank of princes ; an 
elevation you will please to ascribe less to secret vener- 
ation than to excessive newspaper reading. It seemed 
to me, then, that I was called Prince Justinian, and my 
consort Theodosia, the mother of the Princess Theoda, 
and our governess Pomponne, apparently some French 
surname. The private instructions which I imparted, my 
princely hat upon my head, to Madame de Pomponne, 
may sound sufficiently dreamy in somewhat of the follow- 
ing form : — 

My dear Pomponne, I like going at once openly to 
work. What my consort arranged with you yesterda}', 
about Theoda's education, I ratify with pleasure, because 
she wishes it : but as soon as you have read my wishes 
on this subject, I confidently expect some private alter- 
ations in the list of rules which has been laid before you. 
For truly I give out my laws as readily as another, 
though I also intentionally receive some ; one cannot 
always have the crown close at hand in one's pocket, as 
the German emperors formerly carried their imperial 
insignia along with them in every journey : but let people 
beware of resembling my royal cousins, who, as the an- 
cient Persian kings dared refuse nothing to their queens 



A PRINCE'S INSTRUCTIONS. 227 

on their birthday, scarcely ever close their birthday festi- 
vals. 

I confess that shortly after my nuptials, I hoped my 
wife, like those in humbler stations, might possibly take 
upon herself the education of a future princess, and that 
you would merely have borne the title of governess. In 
fact, when I, who best know what a longest day and a 
longest night combined in one four-and-twenty hours sig- 
nify, take into consideration the tedium of a court, I should 
think that a princess, who must feel it even more severely 
than a prince, would for that very reason gladly expend 
her time and her whims on the education of a daughter. 
Since one becomes so weary of courtiers, who, like people 
in boots and stirrups, always think they stand on the pal- 
ace floor most securely with bended knees, that one actually 
longs for dogs and parrots and monkeys, because they, 
indifferent to rank, are always free, new, and interesting ; 
surely my child, who in a court belongs to the small num- 
ber of my equals, and therefore ventures freely to say 
what she thinks, must be even more interesting. And 
should not an excellent royal mother, who can devote 
whole years to a painting or a piece of embroidery, more 
gladly sit to herself and paint herself in the living copy 
of her daughter ? And why do the simple priests at the 
altar only pray that princesses may become happy moth- 
ers, and not that they should continue such by educating 
their children .^ 

But these are only questions. There are many diffi- 
culties which my beloved Theodosia could not so easily 
overcome as my paternal imagination fancied. For the 
rest, she is so loving and tender a mother, as you will 
yourself experience, that she seldom or never permits a 
week to pass witliout once sending (0 call Theoda. 



228 LEVANA. 

Nevertheless, dear Pomponne, much, indeed most, de- 
pends u})on your love and attention to the child. I yes- 
terday heard and subscribed the long chapter on external 
propriety, royal female dignity and reserve ; so let that 
be ; and I will myself, at the right time, procure the prin- 
cess a dancing-master from Paris, who shall instruct her 
in the art of raising or letting foil her train. But, my 
good lady, I hope you will not carry too far that self-con- 
fining fence round every step, that consideration of every 
verbal expression, that squeezing mould, and that crooked 
or straight bending of the body. O, my good Theoda ! 
must it be so ? Court is indeed a pays coutumier, and 
only the country a pays du droit civil, which the regal 
palace least of all is. Many attitudes and impetuosities 
which in my officers I should regard as improprieties 
and offences against my majesty, are in me, the master, 
treated (perhaps from flattery) as original traits, as pi- 
quant and amiable peculiarities ; and the earnest wish is 
expressed that they may be frequently repeated. Acting 
on this method of interpretation, I pray you to permit the 
princess always to run a little. After my marriage I be- 
came acquainted with one of the fairest and most amiable 
princesses, — excepting, of course, your mistress, — who 
had the charming ill-manners — anything else in her 
were not to be supposed — of never moving in a concert- 
room, or other assembly, save at a running pace with full 
sails. And what said the court and foreign princes, my- 
self among the rest, to this } We all praised her anima- 
tion. Now, had she been twelve years old, and her 
governess present, that celestial animation might have 
excited a fire of a very different description. 

Must, then, poor, unhappy princesses be deprived of all 
soul, mid converted into mere machines of propriety, and 



A PRINCE'S INSTRUCTIONS. 229 

be placed in the court as in an ice-oven, through which 
the little naphtha-flame cannot pass ? Must a princess be 
indeed so closely imprisoned that she may never venture 
to cross a bridge on foot, except the fancy park-bridge ? 
Are tears the best princess's washing-water'^ It is at 
least fortunate that we princes have given our name to 
something harder, — prince's metal. Must not the poor 
children, in later years, be bound down in formality with 
golden chains, pompously introduced into life's desert 
where love is not, and banished under the polar sky of 
the throne, which sends forth as much fog and frost as 
does the actual pole ? Even a ruling master lies op- 
pressed under it, who could be very different, and thunder. 
By all means, let everything during public exhibitions 
and festivals be measured and cold ; but not so when she 
is alone with you. White gravel may lie glittering and 
smooth on the garden-walks, but no one uses it in flower- 
beds. The Duke of Lauzun said. To make princesses 
love you, treat them harshly and scold them unceasingly. 
You will certainly not confound this ducal method of se- 
curing love with that to be adopted by a teacher. You 
admire, as I heard you say on Sunday, the Scandinavian 
mythology ; tell me, now, would you wish only to be 
Nossa * to my daughter and not also Gefione ? Health 
is the true Gefione ; and may this goddess lead Theoda 
by the left hand, as well as Nossa by the right ! 

Certainly a beautiful princess has more subjects than 
her [)rince, and certainly nowhere does female beauty dis- 
|)lay its bloom so perfectly as 04i the Alps of the throne ; 
but my offspring will not give to posterity a perfectly 
bloomed flower. Tlie prince's hall, in which, as in a for- 
tress, the German future lays down its safety and its free- 

* The goddess Nossa gave maidens beauty; Gefioue, j rotectLoxi. 



230 LEVANA. 

(lorn, must indeed b^ built by fair and tender, but also by 
strong hands. If -.'^ery mother is a being of importance, 
I should think a -aval mother is one of the greatest im- 
portance. If I ''.an only arrange it so, Theoda shall ac- 
company me rj At July, and I shall have the pleasure of. 
accompanyiPT- you. I will tlien effect much. It is stated 
in the Indian travels of the old Mandelsloh, that only the 
kings amo'ig birds of paradise have feet ; apparently we 
prii>ces p/e only birds of paradise, and every common 
person h our king. But at that time my Queen Theoda 
shall f o on foot ; and, what is more, she shall ride on 
hors^')ack, which no Roman Dictator ventured to do. I 
rea^f/ do not like to think how the health of royal per- 
sorp. must be undermined by things which they probably 
& T ik every day ; had I an hereditary prince royal, I 
(J ould almost lose my senses with anxiety. 

I slr/uld wish you to allow my Theoda to read more 
^Jnglish tbm French books, and more German than both. 
X know nrt what witty author * has shown the similarity 
&f the courtly and worldly tone of mind to that of the 
French literature ; at the same time, the thought is strik- 
ior. J"^ a French book we always live in the fashion- 
fihle w' rid, and at court ; in a German book, occasionally 
in viD^ ges, and in the market-place. I must also have 
tlae ]r"nncess lose some of that awful ignorance about the 
peop/ % which makes her imagine them only a multitudi- 
n )uf' repetition of the fat servants who stand behind her 
G]»a*'\ to remove her plate and clear the table. She must 
not fancy that a beggar cannot be relieved with silver 
cor\ because for convenience she only carries with her 
g(jt\. This, however, is but a very small matter. In 

<■ Vhis was I myself in the tliird volume of tlie yEsthetics; but ia 
dre ^s the best-known things are iurgotten. 



A PRINCE'S INSTRUCTIONS. 23I 

German books, as a whole, there predominates a Iiealthy 
force of affections, boldness of language, love of moral- 
ity and religion, carefully balanced understanding, sound 
common sense, unbiassed all-sidedness of view, hearty love 
of human happiness, and a pair of eyes which look to- 
wards heaven. Now, if this German strength and purity 
be ingrafted on a mind tenderly formed by sex and rank, 
it must necessarily bear the loveliest flowers and fruits. 

A French library, on the contrary, — if I do not j udge 
unjustly, imbittered by Gallic newspaper-writers, and by 
my old loyal tutors, — is nothing better than a kind of an- 
te-room or exchange. Theoda would only read in it what 
she every day hears ; — the same softness of speech with 
hardness of thought (just as mineralogists append to their 
newly discovered stones the soft Greek termination ite, as 
Hyalite or Cyanite; — the same flattery of diametrically 
opposed occurrences, because the man of the world re- 
sembles the Epicurean who denied that a proposition was 
either true or false ; — the same resemblance in other 
matters of the worldly man and the Frenchman to the 
Epicurean school which, unlike every school of philoso- 
phy, had no sects because the whole school agreed about 
wine and meats, women and God. No, no, let my The- 
oda read her Herder and Klopstock and Goethe and 
Schiller ; she will hear enough of Voltaire from her 
chamberlains. You, dear friend of children and of 
French people, are a quite sufficient French library. 
Formerly in German courts — not merely in mine — 
your countrymen and their works were equally welcome 
and effective ; as if what the Romans found in real life^ 
that Gallic slaves made the best shepherds, were also 
true figuratively, and that your nation could furnish the 
best shepherds of the shepherds of the people, — that is to 



232 LEVANA. 

say, tutors of princes, — and also the best shepherds cf the 
people, — that is to say, princes. 

Only do not forget Rousseau and Fenelon, nor Ma- 
dame de Necker and her Memoires. A book more deli- 
cate, refined, elegant, religious, and, moreover, interesting, 
is scarcely to be found for well-educated women than this 
by Madame de Necker, whose jewels possess as much 
medicinal virtue as color and brilliancy. But her 
daugliter, Madame de Stael, may postpone leaving her 
cards for my daughter until the girl is old enough to 
receive so intellectual a visit. 

German princesses now fill and unite almost all Euro- 
pean thrones ; as — if I dare speak so pedantically — 
Aurora's rosebuds do the mountain-tops. Formerly, as 
Thomas remarks, heathen princes were converted to a 
better religion by their marriages with Christian prin- 
cesses. This achievement cannot now be expected from 
any princess ; but it is well for her if she have been brought 
up in a pure religion. He who has no higher and firmer 
heaven above his head than the canopy of the throne, com- 
posed of wood and velvet, is very circumscribed, and has 
but a narrow prospect. And he who, on the blooming 
heights of humanity, attains no happiness, is, if he pos- 
sess not God in his heart, more helpless than the most 
lowly, who, in lamenting over his own humble condition, 
seeks the hope of improvement. Religion only can re- 
ward and arm with energy, tranquillity, life, and peace 
princesses who, hke Narcissus, are too frequently sacri- 
ficed to an infernal deity. By what other aid could 
women in former ages, when there was less refinement, 
endure and even forget to grieve at the rudeness and cru- 
elty of men, tlian by that of religion, which transfigured 
many an hour of tears into one of prayer 



A PRINCE'S INSTRUCTIONS. 233 

whom so much perishes ere the herself dies, needs, more 
than a man does, something which may accompany hep 
as a glorious star from youth to age. And what is the 
name of this star ? In the morning of hfe, it is the star 
of love, later, it is only called the evening star. 

Henry the Eighth of England forbade women to read 
the New Testament ; the age, alas I does so now. Hap- 
pily for my wishes, I know you and your sex. An unbe- 
lieving princess is almost as rare as a believing prince. 
In earlier ages, it is true, we find Gustavus, Bernard, 
Ernest, and some others, anchored to religion as to a firm 
mountain. My position may possibly lead me astray, but 
I confess that, to every ideal I form of female beauty, a 
throne is the footstool. — My travels may form an excuse 
for this, — but so it has always been with my ideals of 
woman's mental beauty, and I have ever seen it crowned. 
" With thorns ? " you ask. " Probably," I answer, " but 
also with gold." 

In short, I believe that a certain ideal delicacy and 
purity of the female soul can be developed nowhere so 
beautifully as in the highest position, — on the throne, — 
as the loveliest flowers bloom on mountains, and the sweet- 
est honey comes from hilly countries ; two resemblances 
which hold forth a promise of the thii-d. As female na- 
ture for her fairest flowers requires forms and customs, 
which may be compared to fine soil and elegant vases, 
whereas man's roots can press through and burst open 
the hardest earth and rocks ; so she finds what alone she 
needs at court, which is, confessedly, all form and custom, 
and that of the narrowest and most absolute description, 
— I do not say this, self-laudatorily, of my own, — for the 
mere fact of an education among the highest ranks, as 
well as the contemplation of the most refined politeness 



234 LEVANA. 

— these forms and reflections of morality, — will be there 
not only as tlie reversed and dim counterpart, but as the 
original bright-colored rainbow. I might also adduce de- 
cency, honor, propriety (of the men as well as of the 
women), delicacy, forbearance, which are all required by 
courts ; and not merely, as is falsely supposed, in the 
public, but also in the private personal demeanor ; I mean 
in every word by which the courtier expresses, not him- 
self, but something better, — a moral seeming. 

Woman's virtue is the music of string instruments, 
which sounds best in a room ; but man's that of wind 
instruments, which sounds best in the open air. As men 
always act most honorably in public, — the act of cow- 
ardice which might be committed in a closet or in a Avood 
becomes impossible at the head of an army or a nation, 
and as we royal martyrs in our apartments too much 
resemble the Greek tragic actors whom the Chorus never 
left for a moment alone on the stage, and, finally, as 
women, avoiding the observation of many eyes, yet pay 
regard to them by the fairest actions, my proposition is 
natural. 

I can still add something. The princess, free from dis- 
tracting labor in the rough service of life, placed in the 
mild climate of physical repose, advantageous to the heart 
as well as to the beauty, brought up rather to observation 
than to action, at least unless she absolutely will, without 
compulsion, enter that black pit of statecraft, at whose 
mouth prince and minister throw off the mantle of love, 
as they would give their servants a woollen cloak to hold, 
I really do not remember how or why I began ; but T do 
know this, that the nobler class of women, even afler a 
long, black, funereal train of misanthropical experiences, 
still keep alive their loving heart and genuine feeling ; 



A PRINCE'S INSTRUCTIONS. 235 

whereas men in such cases, yes, even sometimes after 
one single grievous misfortune, bury their desolate lost 
heart in the perpetual hatred of their species. A wo- 
man could more easily close forever her mouth than her 
heart. 

Why waste many words ? I have seen excellent prin- 
cesses. Without the advantages of the throne they would 
have lost much, and without its disadvantages, the rest. 
In fact, patience, a little suffering, and that of the mind, — 
as when, for instance, years convert the wedding-ring into 
a chain, — and other things of a similar nature, form within 
the flower the fruit, and within that the seed of a heavenly 
life. 

To this head belongs the patience necessitated by the 
courtly tedium of our rank. The Sabbath was especially 
ordained by Moses as a rest-day for slaves ; but it is pre- 
cisely this day of rest which at court is converted into a 
day of unrest. As often as my people envies me during 
these tumultuous festivals, I seem to myself to resemble 
the Spartan helots who were flogged to death to the sweet 
sound of flutes. 

My dear Theodosia would gladly have her daughter as 
highly gifted as herself, and therefore strongly impressed 
upon you the desirability of cultivating her imagination. 
It is, perhaps, because I myself am of a drier and harder 
nature, and prefer keeping myself warm with my wings 
to flying far up into the cold ether, that I lay so very 
much stress on my daughter's possessing sound common 
sense. Indeed, if I could, I should like to undermine this 
powerfulness of imagination. Fancy in a princess pro- 
di>"-es a great many fancies in a prince, hence arise storms 
i' 'he royal atmosphere, and all kinds of volcanic products, 
' 'ning of the treasure-closets, maledictions on .he crown 



236 LEVANA. 

jewels, and much else that I could name. If a fanciful 
woman could carry the whole verdure of the country, in 
its meadows and its woods, compressed and poetically sub- 
limed into one ring, on her finger, in the shape of the 
largest emerald — by Heavens ! Pomponne, she would do 
it ! Therefore, I would most gladly exchange it for a 
sound understanding, if I had it not. I grant one can 
make but very little show with it, but then one can judge 
all the more correctly. And this I certainly know, that 
many a princess, who, during her husband's reign, mod- 
estly showed lierself as nothing more than a sensible, affec- 
tionate mother and wife, could, after his death, (I pray 
you call to mind the widow of my dear old friend in 
]\I — g — n,) replace the father by the mother of her 
country, and with her clear eye, and ear open to instruc- 
tion, rightly guide the vessel of the state. Fancy and 
fancies on the throne, round which, as round other heights, 
more winds blow than behind the low hull of the ship, are 
only full-spread sails in a storm, which the captain, or the 
understanding, ought to take in. 

I would wish Theoda to have as much cheerfulness as 
possible, but wit only in moderation. The latter, when 
united with good sense and a constant kindly heart, may 
perliaps guide, or, at all events, drive, the prince consort, 
as the weak sorceress formerly ruled the Devil ; but wit 
alone, without heart, salt without meat, transform a woman, 
like Lot's wife, who became a pillar of salt, from whom 
the old Lot parted and went on his way. 

But to return to the imagination. I should be glad. 
Madam, if you could discover or excite in my daughter 
a talent for either music or drawing. Music, if only lis- 
tened to and not scientifically cultivated, gives too much 
play to the feelings and fancy ; the difficulties of the art 



A PRINCE'S INSTRUCTIONS. 237 

iraw forth the whole energies of the soul. Hence a cer- 
tain priest, Hermes, in Berlin, recommended girls to be 
taught thorough-bass. Drawing also is good, although it 
has the disadvantage of giving too much preponderance to 
a woman's naturally keen eye for forms. One thing or 
the other ; a painting, for instance, at which a princess has 
labored for about half a year, if it has not been produced 
with the help of the court artist, as private instructor and 
father of the piece, would to her — a bee imprisoned in 
the variegated tulip-bed of the court — smell sweetly as 
the flowers ; for thus she possesses something which she 
sees daily grow under her hands, in which consists the 
happiness of life. The old Saxon princess, who, as I have 
read, embroidered the banks of the Rhine on a robe, was 
certainly as happy, yes, happier, while embroidering it, 
than in the robe itself. At the present day half her 
heaven would have been stolen from her, since, as I hear, 
we no longer possess the left bank. 

With regard to female vanity, you need do — that is, 
say — nothing ; for every word in your apartment is use- 
less if, in the evening at tea or in the concert-room, Theoda 
hear the very opposite from grave men and women, who 
think to do honor at the same time to both rank and sex, 
and by this very confounding of both constantly intrude 
the latter on the poor child. As she grows older, a very 
marked admiration becomes the duty of every courtier, 
since, unfortunately, the stupid printed genealogical tables 
every year declare the age of a princess ; in London they 
act in a still more foolish fashion, and actually shoot the 
number of years into people's ears by the discharge of 
cannon; therefore, she need not — like the modern Roman 
women, whose dislike of perfumes keeps them at a distance 
fjom the altar with its incense — retreat from the adnii- 



238 LEVANA. 

ration naturally attendant on her rank and sex, but simply 
remain standbig. 

And now I come to the most important point ; namely, 
— all of religion and human happiness which I have hith- 
erto desired at your hand for Theoda must assist and be 
subservient to her princely destiny, and not by any means 
work against it. Consolation and fortitude I would wish 
her to draw thence, but no arms against her parents' will. 
This, between ourselves, is what I mean. Since my last 
travels, I do not feel by any means certain that, in eight 
or ten years, my Theoda, regarded as a cement of severed 
lands, or rivet of different crowns, may not be united to a 
prince, whom, which Heaven forbid ! she may from her 
heart detest. To this fear royal parents must submit : in 
fact, I must regard the glory of my house ; and I have 
always considered children as royal pledges, whom I have 
only to place as far from me as possible in order to win an 
extension of territory. Wherefore, Madam, on this point 
my daughter must learn to give no other answer than yes. 
"Would that bridegrooms were as easily selected by diplo- 
macy as brides ! Still some good may be made out of the 
worst case ; and on the rocks of the throne, against which 
others make shipwreck, we can only bleed. A woman, 
previously so undetermined, and obedient to the whole 
compass of male zephyrs, becomes, under the influence of 
a fixed husband, who determines her fate, a steady trade- 
wind. The most ugly often becomes, at the altar, or 
shortly afterwards, the most beautiful ; and a similar 
change often accompanies precisely opposite conditions. 
The priest's words, like lightning on the magnet, easily 
reverse the position of the positive and negative poles. 

But too much of this. I consider my little future son- 
in-law to be honorable, and no one yet knows what kind 



A PRINCE'S INSTRUCTIONS. 239 

of a man mnj grow out of the merry boy. But even 
supposing that tlie priestly blessing were to the princess a 
priestly anathema, and that her honeymoon were passed 
in courtly mourning, yet I cannot help her, at all events 
before she gives her hand. 

It is true, that in Loango a princess, and only a prin- 
cess, can choose what husband she will ; and in Homer 
Penelope had a hundred and eight wooers, without reck- 
oning the absent husband ; but that is of no avail to our 
princesses, especially before marriage, for those are 
neither our times nor countries. Diplomatic marriages 
must be like English soldier marriages, provided not 
merely hands and hearts, but whole countries are to be 
united. Should it really happen that a throne became a 
Gold-Coast where a daughter was sold into a slave-ship, 
then you can give her no fairer princess's dowry and 
marriage-gift than a mother's heart ; this will compensate 
her for all her sacrifices : a child's love is more certain 
than a husband's. 

After such confidence, I require from you no other 
answer than the future, which the governess of a princess 
holds more surely in her hand than does the tutor of a 
prince ; for the latter is relieved and removed, and his 
successors less resemble the popes, each of whom con- 
tinued the building of St. Peter's church, than princes, 
who, for the most part, leave the buildings of their pre- 
decessors unfinished. You, on the contrary, may long 
lead Theoda by the hand ; perhaps even till you resign it 
into that of her husband. May you succeed well ! 

Justinian. 

My dream came to an end along with my letter, and I 
arose. But as I laid aside the crown along with my 



240 



LEVANA. 



nightcap, and became as usual a private person, a critL 
who should blame anything in my instructions would 
prove nothing more than that he was ignorant of, or in- 
different to, Kant's axiom, that a deposed sovereign can 
never be punished for faults committed by him on the 
throne. It is something quite different when I am awake, 
and then fall into errors. 



FIFTH FRAGMENT. 



CHAPTER I. 



ON THE EDUCATION OF A PRINCE. 




§ 102. 

g^jANY readers, especially critical ones, will 
probably, without my aid, make the remark 
and the reproach, that in the former Chapters 
I have treated of the particular before the 
general, — of the education of women before that of men, 
which extends into a wider sphere of moral, intellectual, 
and ajsthetical development ; and that, again, in this Chap- 
ter the particular education of kings is placed before the 
general one of men. And, truly, in the fragment about 
girls, readers will miss any systematic order, and only 
find a systematic want of order for women. Now, should 
any one forget to make these remarks and reproaches, 
they are here set down ready for him. 

Moreover, in treating of the education of a prince, the 
author must again avail himself of the kind reader's for- 
mer permission to turn letter-writer ; but in this instance 
he did not dream a letter in bed, but really sent the sub- 
joined one by post. 

11 p 



242 LEV AX A. 

LETTER 

ON THE EDUCATION OF PRINCES, ADDRESSED TO MR. ADEL- 
HARD, prince's TUTOR AND PRIVY COUNCILLOR. 

Baireuth, October 1, 1805. 

Your invitation, my dear friend, to visit you and the 
prince at his country residence could not have come more 
opportunely than just now, when I am in the very act of 
packing up and taking flight, because the lava stream 
of war seems to take its course towards our country. 
And, what is still better, I am at present engaged on a 
doctrine of education in fragments, one of which, at least, 
must contain a few words about the education of royal 
children ; and I am very much mistaken if I shall not 
find with you that Magna Charta and electoral franchise 
which is the most important for a prince ; namely, that 
which the tutor lays down and prescribes for the little 
prince. In fact, I expect from you two patterns : one ol 
a teaclier, and one of a pupil. 

If you will not regard it as a jest, dear Adelhard, 1 
will now write a long letter, divining and predicting 
what you have begun and accomplished with your pupil, 
merely that I may place the letter among my frag- 
ments as a pocket-mirror for princes' tutors. It seems 
to me that, when I prophesy, my predictions at once 
become rules. 

For I have a kind of dislike absolutely to lay down 
rules. If one must place one's self in the soul of the 
pupil, in order thence to educate him, the task becomes in 
the highest degree difficult for any fellow-creature, es- 
pecially for the tutor of a prince ; because the external 
conditions of royalty differ from ours, not in degree, but in 
kind. Kingly government is totally different from any 



ON THE EDUCATION OF A PRINCE. 243 

Other : ive only experience power over parts, not over the 
whole ; we see ai)proaches to ourselves both from above 
and from below: the prince sees none; but the highest 
and the lowest servants of the state are to him equally 
distant from the throne, equally incapable of holding the 
sceptre. While common plants are contented with the 
common earth and air, the prince, like a plant of foreign 
growth, requires a pecuUar soil, a southern aspect, and a 
hothouse. 

Therefore the choice of the royal gardener is all the 
more important. Fortunately, the kingdom of education, 
at least, is an elective monarchy. Even the court — 
which formerly employed learned men, as the fair Span- 
iards use glowworms at night, only as glittering gems, 
but not as the Indians do fireflies, as lights — regards 
the choice of a prince's tutor as a matter of sufficient im- 
portance to break it up into sects. Do you not remember 
the Schismatics and Separatists in the court of Flachsen- 
fingen about the choice of the prince's tutor? I once 
related them to you on the very best authority, in the 
presence of the principal governess of the royal children. 
You, dear Adelhard, were only selected by the father and 
mother for their child, so that no one should be able to 
day which of the four human beings was the most for- 
tunate. But in Flachsenfingen the queen-mother and her 
party declared in favor of the flat dull-gold court preacher, 
— the king and his adherents concurred in desiring to 
secure my services ; the third party, that of the lord high 
chamberlain and his worn-out favorite, the chief govern- 
ess, all my declared enemies, unanimou?ly voted for that 
genteel, nice young man, whom we all pretty well know, 
that wretched powder without report, which every one 
previously avo/dcd. So very wisely doe? a court know 



244 LEVANA. 

how to unite the happiness of the country with tlie good 
fortune of its own relatives, by seeking the former through 
the latter ! This is the reason why courtiers do not ap- 
pear by any means so unselfish and honorable as they are. 
Just as the banker at a great gaming-table fastens to his 
hat the card (let us suppose it the ace of hearts) upon or 
against which he will not bet ; so the marshal by a golden 
star, and the governess by a golden heart, as symbols of 
light and love, showed which were the two cards on which 
they would never lose or ^vin anything. This is what 
many people call intriguing for the choice of the prince's 
tutor. 

Cliarles the Great, owing to his physical strength, was 
called an army: every prince, owing to his political 
power, may be regarded as a moral army ; and this army 
at first has no other generalissimo than the tutor. He 
alone may freely instruct and touch the mind, w^hich, in 
after years, will neither experience nor suffer contradic- 
tion. This task is more easy and varied than that of any 
future flivorite ; for he has only wax, not marble, to shape. 
He may be bold enough to oppose and punish the pas- 
sions of the little prince, which his subsequent attendants 
will only use and misdirect. Yes, he may carry his in- 
fluence so far — which never minister or favorite yet 
did — as to gain such a victory as Fenelon, who trans- 
formed an ill-disposed Duke of Burgundy into a pure, 
noble-minded man, whose premature death probably 
opened the entrance into the great catacomb of the last 
century. The knowledge, the habits, the principles, the 
tastes, which he may give or leave to his pupil, work 
either for or against all future influences. He may, in a 
spiritual light, imitate the men who carried torches befoi-e 
the Roman emperors, even in the daytime. In short, lie 



ON THE EDUCATION OF A PRINCE. 245 

may — if he possess the power witliin himself — combine 
in one office both the characters of that Dionysius, who 
was a king in Sicily, a schoolmaster in Corinth. Let 
him at least strive to do so ! For to the perfect formation 
of a political prince a man of moral power is necessary; 
he may be called tutor to the prince, but he, in fact, as a 
spiritual father, first gives permission to wear the crown; 
— as the pope, in his character of holy father, gave a 
similar permission to the Jesuit, John the Third, to assume 
that of Portugal. 

Is there, then, my friend, for the whole human race, 
not merely for the royal parents, a higher moral and in- 
tellectual sphere of action than that of tutor to a prince, 
who, perhaps, in the royal child holds in his power the 
future of half a century, — a something which may either 
be the fructifying germ of an oak forest or the powder- 
train of a mine for his country ? If it be granted that 
the first circumstances of a man's education, as the deep- 
est and richest, bear all the rest which time heaps on him, 
I cannot consider the wish too bold, but only natural, that, 
as there are normal schools for teachers, so there should 
be at least one of that kind for the tutors of princes. 

But I will now — so as to have something to put in my 
book — cast the nativity of the past and present, and 
predict what you have done and are now doing. 

I suppose, from your residence in the country, that you 
will as frequently as possible forbid the court to y6ur 
Friedanot (a fine-sounding and significant name !), and 
persuade his parents to see him, for the most part, with- 
out lookers-on. If the cloud of flattery may be to a 
prince a falling mist, it is to a royal child a rising mist, 
which is followed by dark, bad weather. How else than 
by distance can you protect your Friedanot from th© 



246 LEVAXA. 

ladies of the court, who must press around him, al- 
lured by his three graces, of being a prince, a child, and 
a boy. Than this union there can be nothing greater in a 
woman's eyes. As the Emperor of Morocco, so Agrell 
tells us, is drawn by a team of twelve state-horses when 
he takes a drive ; so our little licir to the crown can com- 
mand, when he will, twelve children's carriages, each with 
a dozen lady-drawers. And when at last lie becomes 
twelve years old, he will be absolutely worshipped before- 
hand, so as to secure his adoration afterwards. Chai-acter 
and childhood are both at once destroyed by early gal- 
lantries which incite to gallantries. 

The men of the world reserve their influence for this 
age. If anything, like poison on the nerves, destruc- 
tively opposes the earnestness of a royal tutor's labors, — 
or, indeed, of any teacher, — it is the worldly views of 
worldly people, even when honorable and impartial. Like 
the founder of their order, Ilelvetius, these modern Helve- 
tians, in whom no Ctesar finds an enemy, can be good- 
natured, lovers of the arts, farmer-generals and every- 
thing good, but not martyrs to their faith nor keepers 
of their word. In other respects these Helvetians are 
good enough ; like their geographical namesakes, they are 
lovers of cold, — herdsmen on the heights for which their 
homesick hearts long ; no gold, no Swiss, — united by 
confederacy, — upright in deeds, if not in words, — with- 
out much money ; mere door-keepers of palaces, — in 
short, men who willingly stand and suffer themselves to 
be ordered about, as guards and hirelings in the court o*^ 
a Louis the Fourteenth. But such, Adelhard, are not fit 
companions for an heir apparent. If you have to conduct 
your pupil through two totally different worlds, out of the 
one into the other, — out of that really great world in 



ON THL EDUCATION OF A PRINCE. 247 

which only nobility of soul, character, great principles, and 
comprehensive views are valued, — where only the de- 
spisers of pleasure and the passing hour, the men of eter- 
nity stand, — where an Epaminondas, a Socrates, a Cato, 
still speak from their tombs, and deliver oracles as from an 
everlasting Delphic cavern, — where earnestness of pur- 
pose and man and God bring all things into life ; out of 
this into that world of sham greatness, in which all that is 
great and de[)arted is little esteemed, and what is trifling 
and present is alone held important, — where everything is 
custom, and nothing duty, not to mention kingly duty, — 
where the whole country is looked upon as an estate, all 
offices as appendages of the crown ; where inspiration 
seems a passing love-affair, or a mere artistic talent, — if 
you have to do this, must not all these ghttering influences 
destroy that of the tutor ? Must not the child become at 
least a kind of double creature, a double stone, half dia- 
mond and half common court crystal, which needs but the 
application of heat to sever the scholastic addition from 
the courtly mass, — just as other double stones are tried 
and burst asunder by heat. 

You are, then, right in regarding the easy attainment 
of a glitteringly-cut outside as a small recompense for the 
damage done by people of the world. Must he not, Avith- 
out your help, pass his whole Hfe among decorators and 
manufacturers of cosmetics, as under curling-machines for 
royal heads? And will easiness of demear.or ever become 
difficult to him who, from the freedom of an upright pos- 
ture, has but to return bows ? Nevertheless it will do so; 
everything, crime excepted, becomes princes ; they, like 
great artists, are permitted many external peculiarities ; 
nay, are imitated in them : and what in lower stations is 
considered want of good manners, in the highest is held to 



248 LEVANA. 

denote their superabundance, or at all events, to be a veil 
of Moses drawn over the splendor of the crown. Stiff 
citizen manners occupy only the middle place, the extrem- 
ities approach one another so closely that in the highest 
ranks the freedom of the savage is renewed. 

But you will reply to me in your next letter, and com- 
plainingly say, I can take my Friedanot nowhere but a 
court will follow him : where a prince stamps his foot, a 
courtly circle rises, — as an army did at the approach of 
Pompey, — and the altars of incense smoke around him ; 
for truly the middle and lower ranks flatter their prince 
more injuriously, that is, more grossly and slavishly, than 
the nobility. It is probably on this account that many 
novel-writers think they present us with the most beauti- 
fully sculptured heads of princes on their coin, by merely 
permitting the little dauphin, prince of Calabria, prince of 
Brazil, protector of England, to be educated and kept in 
perfect ignorance of his future rank. In this case the 
dauphin apparently imitates the Mamelukes, by the laws 
of whose empire only he may ascend the throne who was 
not born upon it. The opponents of these few novel- 
writers are merely the whole class of historians. For 
although Machiavelli remarks, that the best among the 
Roman emperors were those who had been adopted, yet 
— besides the exception of Augustus, who adopted him- 
self to the government, and also besides that of many 
emperors chosen by the senate and the praetorian band — 
other histories are opposed to that of Rome ; take, for in- 
stance, that of the East, which never depicts viziers, beys, 
and sultans, brought up in slave-ships, and promoted to 
the ranks of pilot and captain, as better prince? than 
others. Further ; have the popes made bette; rulers 
because they were not born to be popes ? And when, as 



ON THE EDUCATION OF A PRINCE. 249 

on the extremity of the opponent's chess-board, a pawn 
may become a queen, — a peasant, Massaniello, for in- 
stance, become a king, — is his government, therefore, so 
very markedly different from that of those who had ex- 
pected it for twenty years ? And, moreover, in the olden 
time was not every usurper and poisoner of freedom a 
man who in his childhood had possessed no prince's 
tutor, no court, no royal father ? 

A prince, on the contrary, can never contemplate soon 
enough the Tabor of the throne, so that in after years he 
may be gloriously transfigured on it, and not hang as a 
cloud on the mountain. It is the Sinai on which he, pray- 
ing, shall receive the laws, which, in their reflected bright- 
ness, he is to carry down to the desert. I could recom- 
mend no other refuge from anticipated courts for an heir 
apparent than a foreign country, where the native prince 
would draw away all flatterers from the stranger. But 
the evils consequent on the necessary contemplation of his 
future high rank may be guarded against in many ways. 
A child's views of life must necessarily be confused if his 
master is at the same time his servant, or, like a bad royal 
tutor, a compound of tyrant and slave. There may be 
inequality, but let it be upwards. With us lower people 
every father is at times the fellow-laborer and fellow- 
teacher of the schoolmaster ; should not the father of 
his country also occasionally be the father of his son and 
successor ? Antiquity holds out the example of princes 
who were the playfellows of their children ; how much 
more praise would they merit as their teachers ! I can 
imagine no more honorable group than a royal father 
among his sons, earnestly instilling into them the high 
laws of the kingly office, which he himself religiously 
observed. 

11* 



250 LEVANA. 

But if the affairs of government occupy too much of the 
father's time, or if this recreation Avould abstract him too 
much from business, the queenly mother is still there with 
the powerful influence of her heart and of her leisure. 
Baron, the actor, said, that a tragedian should be nursed 
in the lap of queens. It seems to me that the dauphin, 
whom he represents and imitates, claims the first place 
there ; and such a mother will be more usefully em- 
ployed teaching her son, than her husband how to govern. 
'' Crowned mother, do for your son what the uncrowned 
mother of the Gracchi did for hers, so that he may be as 
noble as either of them, and more fortunate than both." 
So, my dear Adelhard, would I speak almost in public, in 
the hope of perhaps cheering some princess who has thus 
acted. 

It were also desirable if kings' children could associate 
with their equals in the school-room ; — I mean if there 
were a school for princes in a higher sense than that near 
Naumburg. We, linked together in a community of chil- 
dren, were all educated under the mutual influence of 
equals ; the heir to the throne sits in the room alone with 
his tutor. Princes learn the art of war only with an army 
of fellow-students ; perhaps that is an additional reason 
why they understand and like it best. 

I am not without the expectation that you attempt to 
preserve Friedanot, although he is now more than eleven 
years old, from poison to a childlike mind, by obliging him 
to pay deference to age and merit. As yet he is merely a 
subject like his tutor, and even his mother. This is a 
matter of great importance ; for the child who does not 
respect grown-up people as such readily enters the path 
of contempt for his fellow-men, — a vice very prevalent 
on the throne. If rank, especially a pro-pective one, out- 



ON THE EDUCATION OF A PRINCE. 251 

weighs the man, to whom properly alone he ought to bow; 
in after years the masses of citizens will, in his princely 
eye, resemble those stags' heads in Fontainebleau under 
which was inscribed, — ''Such or such a Louis did me the 
honor of shooting me " ; and the smaller select number 
will be like certain royal stag-hounds in the same country, 
which a courtier addressed as " Vous, Monsieur Chien," 
though in former times the term " monsieur " was only 
applied to the saints, and afterwards was refused even to 
the five directors of Paris. Since in the eye of princes, 
as in that of the law, or still better in the union of both, 
individual peculiarities are lost in one living mass of souls, 
it is an easy change for a crowned despiser of humanity 
to regard those souls as the mere mechanism of peace and 
war, till one man only seems to exist, — himself. 

Therefore, let a prince, as long as he is a child, always 
measure merit by inches ; for inches are to him yet as 
though they were long years, and years as munificent 
gifts. It is certainly a trifle that you, as I venture to 
guess, contrary to custom, do not permit the servants to 
help the prince first when older guests are at table ; but 
the opposite method would not be a trifle. A Louis the 
Fifteenth (how great a love of children that monarch had 
in the days of his innocence !) may always give his play- 
fellows an order of blue and white ribbon, and a medal 
with the picture of the pavilion in which they played ; 
but the child should not receive the ribbon of an order 
appropriate to mature years as a leading-string ; still less 
should he, as the monarch I have just named, and his 
predecessor, Louis the Fourteenth, hold a lit de justice 
almost in his cradle, or, like other royal children, grasp 
the staff of a commander in the hands which yet feel the 
rod. Why niiuht not as well little ministers and prrsi- 



252 LEVANA. 

dents surround the throne of the royal child, and little 
ambassadors of the highest rank accompany him in his 
carriage ? This degradation of the state, and of human 
nature, works like a destructive poison on the excitable 
mind of the child. To this cause may be traced that 
premature, worn-out, shallow-cunning, cool expression on 
the fiices of so many royal children, — an expression com- 
pounded of the presumption of rank and youth and the 
weakness of age. 

Strange that, while writing this, your last letter but 
one, to which you referred in your last epistle, has just 
come to hand. I now understand much. Your recent 
Friedanot's festival might really be celebrated as the 
alliance between my prophecies and your rules ; or as 
the passage from what has preceded to what is about to 
follow, from negative to positive education. 

To proceed, then : only princes and women can be ed- 
ucated for a determinate future ; but all other men for 
one which is uncertain, for the empire of chance in their 
aims and ranks. Now this is the living spirit of your life 
and of that intrusted to you. The education of a prince, 
like his position in the state, is the only one of the kind. 
As your pupil can never think too modestly of himself, 
so can he never think too proudly of his dignity ; the re- 
verse of this produces misery everywhere. His office, a 
high office at the altar of the state, demands from a falli- 
ble human form the powerful agency of a god. He is not 
merely the first servant of the state, but its very heart, 
which alternately receives and sends out its life-blood ; 
he is its centre of gravity, which gives form to its varied 
powers. Then let German philosophy show him in his 
high station something different from what the persiflage 
of French philosophy, and that of worldliness, exhibits ; 



ON THE EDUCATION OF A PRINCE. 253 

which endeavors to represent the throne as the highest 
heritable place at court, or as a regency with a handsome 
income, and the country as a vast regiment at once ridic- 
ulous and useful. Ah ! verily the ancient error of re- 
garding princes as the sent and anointed of God (which 
in fact every man is, only in different degrees, — the man 
of genius, for instance, or every rational creature as com- 
pared with the beasts) is much nobler, and more effica- 
cious for good, than the modern error of declaring them 
only to be the ambassadors of selfish extortions, that is, of 
the Devil. But let German earnestness of heart show^ the 
young eagle-prince his wings, his mountains, and his sub. 
When some warm, benevolent, but too rash, genius of 
the earth saw the erring efforts of humanity to shape its 
course^ and how, broken up among individuals, it, like 
the S"a, only raised waves, but gave them no direction, he 
longed to give the ocean a boundary and a rapid current ; 
then be called up the first great king to collect the scat- 
tered forces, and guide them to one end. Moreover, this 
genius would have experienced the bliss of seeing nations 
linked together round our globe like the glittering girdle 
of Venus, had he not forgotten something, which another 
and better genius, who always permits more men of gen- 
ius than spiritual monarchs to appear at the same time, 
remembered. I mean, if he liad taken care that a con- 
tinued succession of good kings had drawn a holy family 
circle round the globe, and described a ruling line of 
beauty, happiness, and honor, through all time. Oh I 
what might not poor humanity have become if, like the 
thirty popes who, one after another, continued building 
the great cathedral at Rome, a contemporaneous and 
successive band of princes had, joining temple to temple, 
so urged on the great temple building of humanity ? Can 



254 LEV AN A. 

humanity blame fate for opening to it, tlirough one indi- 
vidual, the way to the highest elevation or the lowest deg- 
radation, when one reckons the number of princes with free 
power to be the leaders of their age and country, and, like 
many flat glasses placed at once before the sun, fancies 
them united into one celestial luminary ? It is not Heav- 
en's fault, but man's, if they have more easily converted 
themselves into the war-gods and scourges of states than 
into their protecting deities. 

I would, therefore, imitate you, and teach the prince 
his dignity ; because only he adorns the station who be- 
lieves himself to be adorned by it. Princes are apt to 
think meanly of princes, as mountains look little when 
viewed from mountains. 

I would indeed, as your fellow-laborer, prepare yearly 
— say, on his birthday — a feast of dedication for the 
}oung heir apparent, a rehearsal of his coronation, in 
which the holiness of his future, the inviolableness of his 
soul, should be gloriously and intimately presented to the 
young eye, longing after virtue, under the triumphal arch 
of great and free nations, in sight of the arms and banners 
of his ancestors and of all past ages. On such a day, he 
might also look down into the abyss of fallen nations. 
Let him learn by heart Plutarch's histories of the great, 
more useful to him than the more recent ; and let him 
every day pray out of the meditations of Antoninus. Let 
that noble order — the name. Father of his country, 
which the great Camillus first bore, as founder of the 
order, and subsequently Cicero, the enemy of Catiline, as 
a member, until it lost its glory and sank down upon a 
Caesar, an Augustus, and such-like meji — burn before 
him, like an illumination on the seven hills of freedom. 
lie must not consider him.-elf a- a cimiUcUKk'r-iii-chief of 



ON THE EDUCATION OF A TRINCE. 255 

all the forces, nor as a minister of foreign affairs, nor as 
president of the council, nor as chief justice, nor as a rec- 
tor magnijicus of all the sciences, but as the protector of 
his country, in the highest sense of that word ; as one 
who has his eye on every department in tlie state, hke 
the true judge of works of art who has taste for every 
beauty. He should be a Jupiter who bears his satelhtes 
and his courtly ring, at once round himself and round 
their common sun. 

" According to tlie usual requirements of learned men," 
you write, "a prince who would govern well, ought to 
unite in his own person the knowledge of all his minis- 
ters, so as to be able to judge of all their affairs. But the 
knowledge of things, which cannot all be embraced by one 
individual, is less necessary and less possible than the 
knowledge of men by whom they must be proposed and 
executed. Consequently, if the prince have only charac- 
ter, and if that have matured steadily and purely under 
the eye of his teacher, he will be able both to penetrate 
into matters and to use vigorous measures." You might 
have copied this out of my own soul. If men have been 
easily able to blind us, yet, in a hundred cases, some 
weakness in our heart, rather than any weakness in our 
eyes, has been first to blame. Among princes a pure and 
firm character is especially needed for seeing and acting ; 
for on the throne the nerve of sight is easily transformed 
into the motive-nerve of the muscles. Mere goodness 
without character will, or may, be governed and used by 
all the enemies of a people ; whereas character without 
goodness can only be acted on by one enemy of the peo- 
ple, — itself. 

The whole present time is a regicide of character, 
especially of all healthiness of character ; for over it 



256 LEVxVNA. 

poisonous victims are passed to bodies and souls, and for 
the sacrifice of a god a man is offered up. Hence so 
many marrowless but sceptre-griping arms ; hence the life 
of so many princes is but a passive " council of five hun- 
dred " ; and even good may only be done and published 
by permission of the subjects. 

So much the better, dear Adelhard, that you endeavor 
to give your pupil a strong body ; only watch over him 
till he has passed through the usual powder-mines of royal 
youth, — the capitals, for instance, of the grand tour, a 
few middle-aged women, and his majority. 

From your letter I can perceive the truth of the sup- 
position I cherish, that you do not recommend or cultivate 
in Friedanot any active love of the arts of painting, music, 
or architecture, lest, as you say, " he should convert gov- 
ernment into a subservient art." Nero, truly, had a geniu3 
for art, — as Frederick the Great had a genius for govern- 
ment, — his whole life, from the time of his subjection to 
the laws of art, even in the midst of his cruelties, and 
down to his last sigh, testifies as much feeling for art as 
absence of feeling for humanity. If, for instance, a prince 
devotes himself, not to adduce more ancient, still less 
modern examples, — like the Macedonian king Europus, 
to making candles (in a metaphorical sense, that would be 
good) ; or, like the Parthian kings, to sharpening swords, 
(that were good in a different way) ; or, like Attalus 
Philomator, to the cultivation of poisonous plants (this 
only admits of no good metaphorical sense), the whole 
court, suppose that of Attalus, would be converted into a 
garden, and every one would seize the royal gardener by 
his weak side, — his botanical mania. All courtiers wish 
their king to love something besides government and his 
country. Every great lord, according to the law, must 



ON THE EDUCATION OF A PKINCE. 257 

practise some handicraft ; but only in the same way that 
every Mussulman, and every Rabbin among the Jews, 
must understand some art, and not, as Montesquieu and 
some others suppose, in order that he may not torture 
people for pastime. 

Am I not, then, agreed in opinion with you, when I say 
that princes need no subordinate pursuit, any more than 
ancient statues neeiled the adornment of colors ? How 
much useless knowledge about history, languages, and art 
might and ought to be spared them 1 

A general love of science, like an alternation between 
two heights, enriches and refreshes royalty, as was exem- 
plified in Frederick the Great. There is a wider pros- 
pect from Parnassus than from the throne. I wish that 
even there, as in the high schools, reading and learning 
Avere called government. And what greater ground for 
alarm would there be, if the king were president of the 
great academy of all the sciences, than that favorites and 
courtiers would become members of it, and understand a 
great deal ? And is it not very much better that he, like 
Louis XIV., should expend sixty-six thousand three hun- 
dred livres in pensions to learned men, than that, like the 
same king, he should waste thirty-three millions of livres 
in the mere lead of the palace at Vei^sailles, and its water- 
works? Openly tell your Friedanot that, in every coun- 
try, where the press is free as well as where it is submit- 
ted to censorship, there is no one to whom so many books 
are forbidden as to the king himself; the censors will 
scarcely allow him a newspaper. Although the king need 
not know so much of law as his lord chancellor, nor so 
much political economy as bis prime minister, he yet 
must know as much or more of the art of war than his 
first general. This union of sceptre and sword is unmis^ 

Q 



258 LEVAXA. 

takable. The royal infant even is consecrated to no other 
inaugural post of honor than that of war. A helmeted 
preface {prccfutlo galeata) precedes his life ; he passes 
his mornings in the arsenal. No prince scruples to serve 
in war among the soldiers of a greater foreign {)rince than 
himself, and to fight and bleed ibr him as unconditionally 
as his meanest subject ; but he would consider it beneath 
his dignity to be the same monarch's prime minister, presi- 
dent of his council, or even general-in-chief of his forces. 

Whence arises, and why is there, tliis equality of royal 
and warlike honor in this and other points, as if the prince 
were only the first servant of the state by being its fore- 
most fighter ? 

Voltaire's saying, " The first king was a successful sol- 
dier," — and the corollary to be di-awn thence, that " A 
successful king is the first soldier," — does not sufiiciently 
explain his position in a state, by his position before there 
was a state. Moreover, war is now only the exception, 
and peace the rule ; and however much the country be 
turned into an arsenal, and the throne into a fortress, yet 
preparations for peace must be carried on as long and as 
industriously as preparations for war. But the prepon- 
deiance of the arts of war over those of peace, in all per- 
sons destined for the throne, may be explained and justified 
by two totally different reasons and sentiments. In the 
first instance, the mutual defence of individuals formed 
the state; and afterwards, as each nation experienced the 
necessity of defending itself against the aggressions of 
other nations, the king seemed to perform his duty to the 
state best by watching over its frontiers, not by becoming 
cliief architect, food-provider, farmer, coiner, and regulator 
of its domestic affairs ; he had rather to act externally by 
the law of tlie stronger, than internally by the power of 
the affection-. 



ON THE EDUCATION OF A PRINCE. 259 

One evil was a necessary consequence of this state of 
things, that nations, — which, in the last resort, only con- 
sist of individuals, — owing to this love of war in their 
governors, fell into that very condition out of which the 
individuals had endeavored to extricate themselves by 
combining to form a state. So little yet does man regard 
the interests of man. Confined to his clod of earth, like 
the insect to its leaf, he does not perceive that every war 
on the face of the globe is, in fact, a civil war ; and a 
dark sea, in a spiritual sense as truly as in physical fact, 
gives, by its concealing cloak, the appearance of separate 
enchanting islands to the girdle of mountains which sur- 
rounds the world. 

But the monarch has a yet weightier ground for his 
love of war ; the sentiment that all dignity arises from 
moral worth, and that the chief basis of manly dignity 
consists only in courage or honor. The brave prince 
covers his head and his inner man with a crown different 
from that which rests on his outward form. Courage or 
honor is expected in every man, but not talent. The 
prince, like the first nobleman in the highest rank of 
nobility, must oppose his enemy with the courageous 
point of honor, as though it were a bright focus of 
burning rays. Courage is a virtue of no doubtful seem- 
ing ; there can be no contradiction, no diversity of 
opinion, about it. A prince who exposes his body, 
carefully protected and consecrated by the state, as 
though it were a common one, to the rank-scorning bul- 
let, against which, in a foreign land, his crown is no hel- 
met, but only a mark, gathers laurels w^ith his own hana 
in the eyes of thousands. But the honor of peaceful 
talents is not so uncontestedly ascribed to him, because 
many a prince has been a sun Avhich the minister must 
surround with his clouds ere it emitted beams 



26o LEVANA. 

I grant that war is accompanied with certain by-charms. 
It is well minutely to dissect them before him to whom 
you would fain render them hateful. A king likes to 
govern, especially when he can do so easily and abso- 
lutely ; on the drum he finds a movable throne ; and the 
art of war is surrounded with a poetical halo ; it is more 
definite and more obvious than the art of government, and 
the movements of the general's baton are more clearly 
marked by the eyes of men than are those of the sceptre. 

The powder-mill of war moves on the wheels of fortune. 
As the southern promontory of Africa, so here the head- 
land of storms, is called the Cape of Good Hope. And to 
what lottery could a ruler more cheerfully subscribe than 
to that of war, — especially because he only ventures 
foreign possessions, and wins no part of his home inher- 
itance, because he wins the whole ? Further, nothing 
irritates a youth so much as to be obhged to mount the 
throne when of mature age, and then find his whole life, 
even down to the horizon, marked out and enclosed. The 
royal youth longs, in the first place, to do something in 
life ; and, in the second, to render himself immortal by it. 
Now, for the accomplishment of the first wish, what means 
lie so near him, or seem so glorious to his fancy, as war, 
which opens to him a career in foreign countries? or 
what can gratify the second desire more easily than the 
field of battle, which matures in one day the precious 
flower of immortality, which would require a whole life 
to blossom on the throne ? The noble Henry IV. of 
France said, " I would rather gird on my armor than 
make laws." It is on the same principle that novices in 
poetry, and novices on the dramatic stage, make their first 
essays in the horrible, the glory arising from which is 
easily and quickly gained. 



ON THE EDUCATION OF A PRINCE. 261 

I think you say in one of your letters that the satiety 
princes experience of the praise and emulation of infe- 
riors, is apt to engender a warlike longing for a contest 
with kings and enemies before the eyes of all Europe. 
Very true ! The poisonous air of courts readily commu- 
nicates that yawning fever of which so many died in 
Italy during the seventh century. Men seek to clear the 
air with gunpowder. 

But how can a young prince ever behold the dark side 
of the glittering form of war, that hellish stream which 
surrounds the living earth and is peopled with the dead ? 
For it is in truth necessary, especially for Germany, 
which is becoming more and more the Hyde Park and 
Bois de Boulogne to which Europe resorts when it re- 
solves to fight. Will you let him hear the chorus of all 
wise men and poets cursing war, the last ghost and sav- 
age army of barbarism ? Will you, before war, preach 
such a sermon as this on peace to the king who is about 
to hurl his torch-like missive to kindle the fire of war ? 
" Consider well : one step beyond your frontiers changes 
the whole face of two empires ; thine own is consumed 
behind thee, thine enemy's before thee. That moment 
an earthquake takes possession of both, and labors to the 
destruction of both ; all ancient law-courts, all judgment- 
seats, are overturned ; heights and depths are confounded 
together. It is a last day, full of rising sinners and fall- 
ing stars ; it is the tribunal at which the Devil judges the 
world, where bodies condemn spirits, physical force the 
power of love. Consider it, O prince ! Every soldier in 
this empire of lawlessness becomes thy crowned brother 
in a foreign land, bearing the sword of Justice without 
her balance, and governing more despotically than thy- 
self Every meanest drudge in the enemy's ranks is thy 



262 LEV AX A. 

king and ju(l.a:c, carrying in his hand nn axe and a haltci 
for thee. Tlie arbitrary powers of force and chance only 
sit upon the double throne of conscience and of knowl- 
edge. Two nations are converted, half into slave-dealers, 
half into slaves, mingled without order among one an- 
other. In the eyes of higlier beings, the human race has 
become an asseml)lage of lawless, conscienceless, stone- 
blind beasts and machines, which robs, devours, strikes, 
bleeds, and dies. Even granting that justice is on thy 
side, yet by the first line of a manifesto, as by an earth- 
quake, thou lettest loose the chained devils of injustice out 
of their prison-house ! The dread despotism thus en- 
throned is so great that little misdeeds never reach thy 
ears, and great crimes only by their frequent repetition. 
For the permission to slay and take possession, includes 
in itself all lesser crimes. Even the unarmed citizen's 
voice is heard amidst the screams and discord ; exchang- 
ing all his plans of life for a few moments' indulgence 
and lawless freedom, treated by the allied soldiers as 
partly, and by their opponents as altogether, an enemy. 
Think of all this, O prince, ere thou hidest thy light amid 
the locust-clouds of war, and ere thou makest the warriors 
of a stranger the judges and executioners in thy hitherto 
justly governed land, or givest thine own soldiers such 
power in the conquered country ! " 

At all events, much might be done. We should en- 
deavor to verify the expressions of a history or a news- 
paper, so short and so lightly passed over, " Battle-field, 
distress of the besieged, a hundred wagons of wounded"; 
which by their perpetual repetition have passed from 
living figures to paintings, and lastly, to mere sounds ; 
we should picture them in all their terrible details, in the 
suffering which one wagon bears and fearfully increases, 



ON THE EDUCATION OF A PRINCE. 263 

m the 07ie agonizing day of a single fainting and dying 
soldier. Not only histoiy, in which all ages and nations 
bleed, but our common newspapers and way of speaking, 
and the scientific appearance of warlike preparations for 
surgical assistance, change wounds into words, and the 
monstrous amount of suffering into letters. Hence, the 
same minister who tranquilly observes the hygrometer of 
war's bloody rain, and cheerfully orders a bath of blood 
for two nations, is overcome by the wounds and tears of 
a stage-play, merely because the poet's art transforms the 
words back to their living meaning. A prince Avhose 
tendencies you feared might be conducted over a bloody 
battle-field with the same warning advantage as accrues 
to children of a different class who are led through an 
hospital. But God grant that humanity may ever fail to 
offer such schools and such remedies ! 

Properly, — and this might be instructively said to a 
prince, — the people only should decide upon war with 
another nation, that is, upon a return to the first state of 
nature ; especially as they only gather its bitter, not its 
sweet fruits ; and should determine w'hether they are 
willing to give themselves up as a sacrifice to the storms 
and tempests of war. It is a crying sin against Heaven, 
that one king, for an offensive expression from another 
king, should involve two nations in mortal strife. In 
reading modern history, one shudders to see how the 
merest trifles have kindled the fires of war ; how a 
woman's pin, or an ambassador's finger, has been the 
conductor of a thunder-storm, ravaging whole countries. 
The wars of modern times ought certainly to strike sol- 
diers only, not the ranks of unarmed citizens. When 
the more active part of the latter disturb the operations 
of the former, as in shooting from houses, they at once 



264 LEVANA. 

appeal to the right of disthiction, and proceed to attack 
and punish them ; but why sliould the unarmed classes, 
without the advantages, yet participate in ail tlie suf- 
ferings, plunder, imprisonment, &c., of those who are 
armed ? One or all of these three remedies must be ap- 
plied to this terrible coil, in order that the future may atone 
for the past : either tliat naval conflicts may be carried 
on without letters of marque, and that in land fights the 
soldiers may be placed in some desert, as the scene of 
their many-voiced and many-handed duel ; or that, as in 
republics which have fallen to destruction or risen to an 
unearthly life, every citizen should be a soldier, and con- 
sequently every soldier a citizen ; or, finally, that the 
eternal banner of peace should hang down from heaven, 
and flutter m the pure ether above the earth. 

I have an idea that either you, or one of your friends, 
once declared that history — the long war-report and 
bulletin of humanity — imparted the infection of war to 
young princes. But I would almost trust to it as the 
remedy for the love of war. Charles XII. of Sweden 
could scarcely have imbibed his passion for glory and 
conquest from the mere perusal of Curtius's Life of Alex- 
ander, since Alexander had the same passion without 
having read his biography; and Ccesar, also, without 
knowing more of Curtius than his hero. In history may 
be found the test of the anchors and swords of sea and 
land fights. It alone shows to the monarch, thirsting for 
glory, how little mere bravery appertains to glory ; for a 
cowardly nation is more rare upon the earth than a brave 
man. What nation, in ancient or modern times, is not 
brave? At present, for instance, all Europe is so; Rus- 
sians, Danes, Swedes, Austrians, English, Hessians, 
French, Bavarians, and Prussians, all are brave. The 



ON THE EDUCATION OF A PRINCE. 265 

lower Rome's free spirit sank, the more wildly and vehe- 
mently rose the merely brave spirit ; Catiline, Caesar, 
Augustus, had conquerors for their servants. The fre- 
quent arming of the ancient slaves, as of the modern 
beggars, testifies against the value of the common bravery 
of fists and wounds. Iphicrates, the Athenian, said that 
the best soldiers were those who loved plunder and vio- 
lence ; and General Fischer has added to these, vaga- 
bonds. Cannot a monarch wish to shine upon posterity 
with something else than the fair tiger-spots of a con- 
queror, in which the Timurs, Attilas, Dessalines, and 
other scourges of God, or knouts of the Devil, outdo him ? 
How coldly does one walk in history over the countless 
battle-fields which fill the earth with beds of death! 
And with what curses does one hasten past the crown 
which, like the ajutage, or leaden head of a pipe, raised 
by the upward gushing of a fountain, is only kept up by 
starting streams of blood ! But where an eternal glory 
hovers round some heroes, as those of Marathon's plain 
and Thermopylae's pass, there other spirits fought and 
fell, — heavenly visions of the courage of freedom. And 
whatever individual stands greatly forth in history and 
fills its spaces, does it not from any pyramid of skulls 
erected on battle-fields ; but a great soul hovers there, 
like the form of an unearthly world glorified in the night, 
and touches the stars and the earth. 

For there is a nobler courage, which once, though not 
long, Sparta, Athens, and Rome possessed, — the courage 
of peace and of freedom, the bravery which showed itself 
at home. Many a nation, a cowardly slave in its own 
country, but a bold hero out of it, resembles the falcon 
(though become tame, unlike it, rather by sleeping than 
by sleeplessness), which is carried hooded on the wrist of 

12 



266 LEVANA. 

the falconer, until left to its ancient freedom, a momenta- 
ry wooer of the air, it boldly and bravely vanquishes some 
new bird, and then returns with it to the slavish earth. 
But the truly, because freely, brave people carries on its 
war of freedom at home, against every hand which would 
stay its flight or blind its eye ; this, indeed, is the longest 
and bravest war, and the only one which admits no truce. 
Just so brave, and in a higher sense, may a monarch be. 
Let the great ideal of art, to unite dignity with repose, be 
the ideal of the throne. To extinguish the flames of war 
is more worthy of a king, as it is more difficult, than to 
kindle them. If this bravery of peace be already secured, 
whereby alone a monarch can distinguish himself in his- 
tory, — then that of war, if necessary, becomes easy, and 
every wound glorious. Hence the great men of antiqui- 
ty are rather distinguished by their character than by 
their deeds, rather by the trophies of peace than those of 
war ; the plough-heroes of battle-fields by an intensity of 
love, which, as in Phocion, sowed the steep cliffs which 
bound the mighty ocean with balmy spice-plants ; which 
in Cato the younger loved and bewailed his brother with 
all a woman's tenderness, and caused Epaminondas to re- 
member the duties of a host even on the scaffold ; which 
made Brutus a tender husband, Alexander a trustful 
friend, and Gustavus a Christian. 

It seems to me that a young prince should view the 
future which he helps to form from this side and through 
this opening in history ; in this manner he must learn to 
subject the inferior to the nobler kind of courage. Cer- 
tainly a king who avoided war from cowardice would be 
more dangerous — especially in the present position of 
Germany — than one who sought it from foolhardiness ; 
and, moreover, he would be less easily cur'id. The seep- 



ON THE EDUCATION OF A PRINCE. 267 

tre resembles Saturn's scythe, which is at once the emblem 
of harvest-time and of death. 

The tiling that grieves me, when I consider the excel- 
lence of the education you, dear Adelhard, impart, is that 
it will be of little or no use, unless you are ennobled, or 
unless the prince might remain at home. I mean this : 
I cannot but lament that he must grasp the pilgrim's staff 
before the sceptre, and must pass through the three king- 
doms of nature, or three courts of the grand tour, Italy, 
England, and France, in order to return different from 
■what he started ! Enough cannot be said in favor of 
travel, but not of early travel. Let the man, not the boy, 
travel ; let his travelling-cap be the crown. If he go un- 
crowned, sent as a travelling fortune to the fair of Paris, 
we know — by the example of his noble companions — 
what, not to speak of ruined health, he will bring back ; 
namely, a mind full of contempt for his little inland pat- 
rimony, full of plans for miniature imitations, and of 
acquired notions whose importation the Prussian Lycur- 
gus and the Spartan Frederick the Second prevented, the 
one into the nobility, the other into the people, by forbid- 
ding travelling. If we wish, by imitation, to give the 
dominion over our domestic affairs to foreign countries, 
which by treaties of peace — those of Westphalia and 
Lun^ville, for instance — have already quite sufficiently- 
ruled and changed the constitution of the Germanic em- 
pire, I really think we burden ourselves with too great a 
weight of gratitude, especially when we consider the rare- 
ness of the opportunities for requital. If foreign travel 
is indispensable to mental growth, why do we see so few 
dauphins, so few princes of Wales, of Austria, or of Bra- 
zil, in our hotels ? If the coat of worldly varnish given 
by strangers cannot be done without, fortunately his court 



268 LEVANA. 

>vill be so frequently visited by so many who will gladly 
linger there a long time, that he may easily remain at 
home. For the same reason, among the artisans of Ber- 
lin, Konigsberg, and other large towns, the sons of master- 
workmen are not required to travel like other journey- 
men. 

But there is one country which an heir apparent may 
minutely survey in his travels, — it is his own ; and the 
deeper he penetrates into the lower classes, the more pro- 
ductive of benefit will his journey be. Like an ^neas 
or a Dante, he will return a wiser man out of this lower 
world into the upper regions of the throne. A prince 
cannot picture to himself hunger as anything other than 
a rare gift of God and of the stomach ; or labor, than as 
a hawking-match to procure it ; or the people, which ex- 
periences enough of both, as anything different from the 
pampered crowd of his court servants. If in Corea the 
people must shut their doors and windows when the king 
is passing by, we may be sure that he will also close his 
from the eyes of his people : and so one invisibility pro- 
duces the other. 

If he be crowned and married, and about as old, or 
even older, than Joseph II., or Peter the Great, or popes 
on their travels, or the ancient Romans whose proconsul- 
ships were also journeys, he will receive greater advan- 
tage from his travels than he would even as his own 
ambassador ; for he will see everything more accurately, 
more quickly, and be less taxed for doing so. Boling- 
broke tells us, that if at forty we read again some of our 
childhood's books we shall find everything new : even so, 
if at the same age we revisit the land of our youth, wc 
shall find a new world, previously overlooked. A young 
prince, perhaps, brings home with him out of some ibi- 



ON THE EDUCATION OF A PRINCE. 269 

eign country a faded garland, as a memento of rare 
flowers of happiness ; a prince of mature age brings also 
the seeds of those flowers. When the warm-hearted, 
manly, true German Duke of Meiningen travelled, the 
year before his death, to one of the southern cities of Ger- 
many, he did not visit courts, balls, princes, and women ; 
but machines, manufactories, soup-kitchens, mines, artists 
and their works, financiers and their tables, — ah ! why 
was he doomed so shortly afterwards to make the longest 
journey to the most distant country ? A noble prince 
who loves his people can never tread that path too late. 
But if your Friedanot must go on his travels before he 
ascends the throne, I would wish you to be ennobled and 
to accompany him. Every royal tutor should receive 
nobility from his connection with a prince, just as iron be- 
comes magnetic by contact with a magnet, in order that 
he may afterwards be employed at the dinner or card 
table, when, otherwise, his place must be occupied by 
some one whose rank admits him to the royal table. 
How happy is a princess whose Orbilia and La plus 
Bonne is, from the commencement, of such high rank that 
she may ever remain near her ! " Turba medicorum pei- 
didit C^sarem " : * this epitaph on Adrian is also true o*.' 
the multitude of " soul curers." 

Many of your regulations for princes may be readily 
guessed, because they must also have a place in the edu- 
cation of every child ; only that qualities which the latter 
must use as small coin in every-day life are required 
from princes as gold for the mint, and for the adornment 
of the palace. In the first place I rank keeping his woru. 
Princes rarely break their word, except to whole coun- 
tries, — their own, and foreign lands. The word given to 
* " The multitude of doctors killed Caesar." 



270 LEVANA. 

one man, tlieraselves perhaps excepted, they always keep. 
Chamfort remarks, that, up to the ministry of the Cardi- 
nal de Lomenie, fifty-six public breaches of faith were 
reckoned in Henry IV. These may readily be explained 
by the rarefying power of space, which, far more than 
time, immediately decomposes the strongest powers ; as, 
for instance, electricity, attraction, philanthropy, freedom, 
and a promise. Distance, for instance, inconceivably 
diminishes British freedom, even in Ireland, as it formerly 
did in North America ; but at sea, and in the colonies, it 
is, by distance, rarefied to such a degree, that only the 
quick eye of a captain or a nabob can distinguish it from 
absolute slavery. In the same way a promise is so weak- 
ened by distance, that even a peace concluded a century 
or so before, by the naval powers of Europe, could not 
avert war from India. Physics, as already said, show 
the cause of this phenomenon. This ftict, perhaps, ren- 
ders a lecture-room and teacher for speaking truth more 
necessary to an heir apparent. Indeed, this speech is 
quite as important as the Lusatian or Italian, which, ac- 
cording to a golden bull, every future elector, king of 
Bohemia, and pfalz-graf of the Rhine, had to learn in his 
seventh year ; or even as the French, though no bull has 
declared that essential. 

Royal truthfulness towards his own and other nations 
is not only, as others have said, a monarch's highest pol- 
icy, but also, and for that very reason, the most difficult. 
Upright minds are like straight roads, which seem to the 
eye scarce half so long as those which wind artfully about ; 
but their true length is found by a nearer examination. 
Only a prince who cherishes noble and well-considered 
desires will choose to reveal them ; as it is only cut dia- 
monds of the purest water which can be set so that the 
light may shine through. 



ON THE EDUCATION OF A PRINCE. ZJ\ 

Under all treaties of war and peace there lies a higher 
bond of union than power, — because without it they could 
not even be formed, - — it is reliance on a given word, on 
the power of character, not on land and sea forces. But 
in history, which else accurately lays before us from 
month to month the cost of the new triumphal-arches 
for fresh victors, there is nothing more rare than an hon- 
orable niche devoted to a king who speaks truly for the 
present, and prophesies truly for the future. Royal truth- 
fulness presupposes force of character, resolute courage, 
and just strength of will. Finally, where this oak forest 
stands and grows around a throne, there is the ancient 
German sanctuary ; the throne within its shadow works 
miracles, and the people round its base pray to Heaven for 
protection. You and I hear such a forest rustling so near 
our study that we could count its leaves. 



Baireuth, January, 1806. 

I have again unpacked my goods, because peace con- 
tinues ; so that our meeting, as well as the review and 
ratification of my predictions, must be postponed to a 
more favorable season. In conclusion, and in jest, I ap- 
pend a few aphorisms on education, suitable for insertion 
in albums ; which I prepare from time to time for the 
various royal and noble tutors who visit my study, so as 
to have a few useful impromptu thoughts ready to be 
written down when they hand me their albums. The 
following thoughts have not yet been inserted in such 
books : — 

To form a brave man, educate boldly ! Brave painters 
alone, pavs Lavater, can hit a brave face. 



272 LEVANA. 

Not without reason do the rarest flowers borrow theil 
names from princes. Power cannot have too gentle an 
expression. The look of a king is itself a deed. Conse- 
quently a king can choose whether he will all day kill or 
make alive. The sceptre should not be a rod of authority, 
but, like a magnetic needle^ should assume the form of th 
lily. It is easier, like the tragic Crebillon, to obtain the 
surname of the terrible, than, like Virgil, to merit the 
epithet of the maidenly. A flute lay side by side with 
Frederick the Great's baton of command. Let every 
prince regard this as an allegory. 

He who mistrusts humanity is quite as often deceived 
as he who trusts men. The wicked and despotic favorite 
always advises a king to rule himself, not to let others 
govern for him ; to see and hear for himself (at least to 
see and hear the favorite), and not to be a mere repeater 
on which an external hammer strikes the time, but to be 
a church-bell, which sounds with its own tongue, and 
which the favorite rings whether for funerals or wed- 
dings. 

Tutor ! Have at heart no work of your pupil so much 
as love of work ; it is this he should learn by that. And, 
unless he learn to be a lover of work, he will in after 
years (as Vopiscus tells us the Emperor Carinus did) keep 
a servant to write his signature ; or, if he write it himself, 
he will do so like that self-made slave of his own servants, 
Philip the Fifth of Spain. 

On the throne everything, even time, — as in Basle, — 
is wanted to be an hour earlier than it leally is ; thought, 
consequently, long before reflection. Royal impromptus, 



ON THE EDUCATION OF A PRINCE. 273 

as the winged seeds of action, are always dangerous; they 
often make long diets and long judgment-days necessary, 
and have to count forced imposts instead of freely granted 
tributes. How many subjects has a hon-mot killed! How 
many suggestions of the wicked one have been acted on 
by haste ! He who needs proofs has but to inquire of the 
chief justice in history. What more excellent object, I 
ask, can a teacher set before himself than to accustom his 
pupil never to say an important yes or no, never to express 
a like or a dislike, without taking an hour's respite to con- 
sider the question, request, or sin ? With such a letter of 
grace {moratorium) he might write himself a brevet of 
infalHbility. But why speak I of princes ? Every one is 
in this position ; only that the high rank of monarchs fear- 
fully increases the rolling, avalanche-like consequences of 
every sound. And it is precisely in the higher ranks that 
men perversely attend more to deeds expressed in words, 
— bon-mots, impromptus, &c., than to words expressed in 
deeds, — decretals, resolutions, &c. ; and take time to con- 
sider a jest, though not a serious matter. Let the teacher 

invert this inversion Dear Adelhard, I am myself 

this moment guilty of improvising ; so difficult is it to be 
avoided. For this last article for the album I really made 
for the letter ; the former would require it to be much 
more compressed. So powerful is the influence of the 
present moment ; one confounds letter, album, and book 
all together. Fare you well, dear Adelhard ; and, in this 
respect, fare better than I. 

I wished to add this apothegm also : " Above all 
thing', inspire a prince with the taste for reading, — not 
merely the inscriptions on triumphal arches and in illu 
minations, but books and acts " ; but, if I am not mis 
taken, it is already written in your album. Cabinet 
12* " E 



274 LEVANA. 

secrets, like the light of the fixed stars, reach us for the 
first time many years after their emanation ; but the 
secrets of the study, like the light of the planets, never 
reach so far as the fixed stars. 

Yours 

J. P. F. R. 

Postscript. — As there was no post, this letter to you, 
excellent prince's tutor, has lain in my desk during the 
sale of the whole first edition of Levana ; it was printed, 
but not despatched : luckily, while preparing the second, 
a young tutor, dismissed from a certain court, visited me, 
and promised to deliver you my letter. For the rest he 
curses the whole matter for hours every day, and declares 
he would almost rather be a prince than a prince's tutor ; 
for the one only spoils himself, whereas the tutor spoils 
others too. He openly derides my whole letter to you, 
as a mere waste of paper and ink, and says I have only 
forgotten the principal thing, the so-called governor both 
of prince and tutor. He asked me to teach him '• what 
use it was to be the very best of tutors, as a man must 
become the very worst if the prince's governor so choose ; 
who is regarded as the upper house to the tutor's lower 
house, or college rector to his inferior school." But, 
instead of waiting my instructions, he continued angrily: 
" The governors, who never permitted him even to be 
vice-governor to the prince, were as old in rank as in age, 
and consequently took precedence in everything of him, 
who was only perfectly capable of all his duties ; so that 
the young prince regarded him merely as a subordinate, 
as a kind of school-fox whose master Reynard was the 
governor. The word of a man who sat at the same din- 
ner table with the prince was more esteemed by him and 



ON THE EDUCATION OF A PRINCE. 275 

by the whole court than the sermons of one who might 
only sit near him at the study-table." 

I replied, that on this matter I would take the part of 
the men of the world. The schoolman has about as much 
relation to the nobleman as the Abbot Fowler, for instance, 
has to a fowl. As, according to Kant's observations, we 
soon grow weary of the most excellent human singing, 
but never of the perpetual singing of birds, because it is 
subject to no rule, and its variations are quite undeter- 
mined ; so the scholar, by the monotonous unity of his 
thoughts and discourses, always aiming at one end, soon 
drives to sleep ; whereas the courtier, flitting from one 
subject to another, engages the attention, just because he 
says nothing very definite, and because variety of mere 
nothings gives more pleasure than uniformity of some- 
thing. 

" A governor," continued he, " who only thinks of king, 
court, and nobility, and orders the prince to be educated 
only for these, will bar with the collars of his multitudi- 
nous orders all the havens into which a tutor would con- 
duct his pupil to the sound of silver flutes. He will throw 
in his teeth the accurate 'revision' of his plan of education 
(none so good as that which is printed) ; and if the tutored 
tutor think differently, he has only the choice of being 
frightened or being angry." 

" Truly, not bad ! " said I, " for by this means the tutor 
will be educated to be tender and better than he can edu- 
cate the prince. In the same way, cooks make poultry 
tender and tasty by putting them into a pond, or a turkey 
by throwing it from a considerable height before killing it, 
— this has the effect of fright on them ; or they irritate 
them by whistling and shaking red cloths at them, — which 
has the effect of rajje." 



276 LEVANA. 

"We must then experience," concluded the tutor, "what 
is the consequence if the governor can use the sceptre as a 
good school-cane to the citizen teacher; I do not mean 
what the governor becomes (for he goes away hke myself), 
but what the innocent prince becomes, in whom, placed as 
a young master between a flattering upper servant and a 
kneeling slave, no manly character can possibly be devel- 
oped, — no bones grow." 

" But," said I, " I do not see the evil of that. I myself 
know many people of rank, whose whole inner man does 
not contain one whole bone, but who precisely resemble 
people struck by a thunder-bolt, in whom the , lightning 
generally only breaks the bones, without in the smallest 
degree burning or injuring the external form. And so it 
is, my friend ! " 

As, however, we could neither of us quite agree, and I 
could not become perfectly serious, I think I have adopted 
a very sensible plan in sending him to you with this post- 
script, so that you may either alter or confirm his opinion. 
You must certainly know whether there is any difference 
among governors, and whether the course of the little 
prince may not occasionally describe an accurate ellipse 
round the two foci. Heaven grant that, and many other 
things too ! 



SIXTH FRAGMENT. 

ON THE MORAL EDUCATION OF BOYS. 

Chap. I. Moral Strength; Physical Strength; Games of Hurting; 
Injariousuess of Fear and of Fright; Love of Life; Lisufficiency 
of the mere Passions; Necessity of a Youthful Ideal, §§ 103-110. 
— Chap. IL Truthfulness, Charades, and Children's Plays, §§ 111 
-115. — Chap. IIL Education of the Affections; Means of arous- 
ing them; Love of Animals, §§ 116- 121.— Chap. IV. Supple- 
mental Appendix on Moral Education; Various Consolatory Kules; 
Stories of Parents for their own Children; Children's Journeys; 
Danger of a Premature Feeling of Shame, and on the Modesty of 
Children, ^^ 122-129. 

CHAPTER I. 




§ 103. 

ONOR, honesty, steadfast will, truthfulness, in- 
difference towards threatening wounds and 
endurance of those inflicted, openness, self- 
respect, just self-appreciation, contempt for 
the opinion of the world, justice and perseverance, — all 
these and similar words indicate only one half of the 
moral nature, viz. moral strength and elevation of char- 
acter. The other half embraces all our connections with 
others ; the realm of love, gentleness, benevolence, — in 
short, what may be called moral beauty. 

If the one seems to turn inwards, towards itself, the 
other outwards, towards others ; the one to be a repelUnsj 



278 LEVANA. 

the other an attracting pole ; if the one regards an idea 
as holy, and the other rather esteems life to be so, yet 
both are equally elevated above self, which is only the 
object of the animal propensities, and of the sins against 
the twin stars of the heart ; for honor, as well as love, 
sacrifices selfishness. Moreover love does not seek and 
contemplate in another what it avoids in itself; but it 
beholds and embraces therein the image of the divinity. 
"We find God twice : once within, once without us ; 
within us as an eye, without us as light. Yet is it every- 
where the same ethereal fire, indifferent whether it spring 
up from without or within ; and, indeed, the one presup- 
poses the other, and consequently a third which produces 
and unites both. Call it the Holy. In the spiritual 
world there is properly no out and no in. Love is natu- 
rally the companion of true moral strength, as we ever 
find sweet fruits on strong branches ; weakness trembles 
like a Vesuvius only to destroy. Even so, pure love can- 
not merely do all, but is all. / 

§ 104. 

But here we are only concerned with the difference of 
appearances, not with their foundations. The former 
show us man born and fitted out more for moral strength, 
or honor, and woman for moral beauty, or love. From 
our former position, "that woman does not divide and 
contemplate herself as man does," we might deduce 
the division of the two moral poles, with varying balance 
between both sexes, ascribing love to the female, and 
strength to the male, because the former is more occupied 
with what is external to herself, but the latter in examin- 
ing what passes within himself. But why reason about 
facts? This moral difference between the sexes is re- 



MORAL EDUCATION OF BOYS. 279 

peated, although in miniature, in every individual ; but 
more of this hereafter. We will now view the educa- 
tional means of adapting the boy to his destination by 
developing moral strength of character. 

§ 105. 

One age requires men in order to exist, another in 
order to subsist ; ours needs both ; and yet education 
dreads nothing more than making boys manly, and, 
where possible, strives to unman them. Nurseries and 
school-rooms are like altars in the temples which the 
Romans dedicated to Pavor and Pallor (pale fear). As 
though the world were now too full of courage, teachers 
ordinarily ingraft fear by punishments and actions, but 
only recommend courage by words. Not undertaking, 
but letting alone, receives the victor's crown. 

In Nestor's order of battle the timid occupied the mid- 
dle ranks ; it is so also in our states ; and more physical 
courage is found in the highest and lowest ranks than the 
scholar or the schoolmaster usually possesses. Hence 
the latter expects his boys to resemble the Iroquois, who 
think a hare is a deity ; and even endeavors to raise 
them to a place among these gods. The ancients, in 
their veneration for strength, forgot benevolence ; we err 
in the contrary direction. The effeminate teaching class 
may, however, excuse itself by this disappointment ; 
namely, that the courage of children, owing to their 
deficiency in the counterbalance of prudence, readily 
turns to rashness, and attacks teacher and fate. But 
let us remember that years do indeed increase light, but 
not force, and that it is easier to provide a pilgrim on 
life's journey with a guide, than to restore to him, like a 
statue, the legs and wings which have been removed les< 



28o LEVANA. 

he should run or fly away. We will, like warriors, begin 
with common courage, and proceed upwards to honor. 

§ 106. 

The body is the coat of mail and breastplate of the 
soul ; so let this in the first place be hardened into steel 
by heat and cold. Let every father provide, as well as 
he can, a little gymnastic school round his house; the 
very street in which the boy plays, runs, falls, climbs, 
and bids defiance is something. Wounds got in the 
street are sooner healed, and more wholesome, than 
wounds got at school, and they teach better how to bear 
pain. Out of the wild English youth there grows a 
thoughtful member of parliament; as out of the early 
Roman robbers a virtuous self-sacrificing senate rose. 
The Romans bled the rashly brave ; the schoolmaster's 
rod also lets blood ; and the starving method, solitary con- 
finement, &c., pales the remainder. No power should 
ever be weakened, — one cannot repeat this too often, — • 
but only its counterbalancing power strengthened: in 
squirrels, the upper row of teeth often grows painfully 
long, but only when the lower one is lost. A rash 
twelve-year-old Dreadnought might soon enough be made 
thoughtful ; you need but read through with him some 
anatomical or surgical book ; but this remedy, like arse- 
nic, is only to be used in the most desperate cases, and in 
the smallest possible doses. Bodily weakness makes 
mental weakness ; and mental weakness leaves deeper, 
ay, perpetual traces behind it : the broken arm is much 
sooner cured than the broken heart of a child. And, 
lastly, children are spoiled in two different ways in the 
young sick-room ; the healthy by severity, the sick by 
weak indulgence. Now the sick would be much better 



MORAL EDUCATIOX OF BOYS. 2J^1 

served by the mental excitement of pictures, little games 
on the pillow, and tales, than by physical indulgences. 
If health be the first step to courage, bodily exercise is 
the second against pain. This in modern times is not 
only abandoned, but actually contradicted; and with us 
the boy is fastened up, not that he may learn, but that he 
may not learn to bear it, and that he may at once begin 
to confess. Detestable method! 

How can the change of the torturing system, formerly 
adopted by the judicial courts, so far confuse you with 
regard to education, that you do not value the power of 
the mentally strong, opposed to the physically strong, but 
consider firmness a repetition of the denounced fault? 
This is as egregious a mistake as Lockers advice to dis- 
gust children with card-playing, by compelling them to 
practise it ; for this official change, produced by disgust 
at the compulsory repetition of the game, would be a 
worse disease than that it cured. Must we not, in this 
place, severely attack another error in education, — a 
most repulsive one, though concealed by the showy paint 
of custom, — it is that of harshly punishing children 
before other children, in order to make them a so-called 
example ? For either the child as a cold observer shares 
the sentiments of the passionate punisher, and feels no 
compassion for the torture-wrung cries of his equal, no 
disgust at the repulsive sight of the cruelly used victory 
of the strong over the weak, — and then, indeed, I know 
not what more his heart can lose, — or else the child ex- 
periences all the pain which the judgment-seat raised in 
the nursery inflicts, and so, as is the case with grown-up 
people at executions, thinks the punishment greater than 
the fault, — and then any advantage to be derived from 
the painful sight is lost ; or, lastly, he at once pities and 



282 LEVANA. 

comprehends the punisliment, and feels the greatest dread 
of sueh terrible pain, — and then you certainly do secure 
obedience, but you increase fear. In short, do not inflict 
severe punishments in the presence of children ; be satis- 
fied that their invisibility, coupled with what is related of 
them, will secure the advantages without the disadvan- 
tages. 

It would be much more desirable to establish exercises 
in bearing pain, schools of the cross in a stoic sense ; and 
indeed boys themselves have games of a similar nature. 
Formerly in Mexico one child bound his arm to that of 
another child, and placed a live coal between ; both con- 
tended who should longest bear the burning pain. In 
Montaigne's childhood, the nobility considered fencing- 
schools mean, because, by their aid, victory no longer 
depended solely on courage. The ancient Danes did not 
even wink the eye at wounds in the face. "What was 
formerly attained by whole nations, and, consequently, 
was not the gift of birth, but of education, — this surely 
must be suificiently easy to repeat in individuals. 

Never make lamentation over a child's hurt, but pass 
it off with a joke. If a little child runs to you to show 
its hurt, let him wait a little before he engages your eye 
or ear, and in the mean time say quietly to him, " I must 
first finish my writing," or " knit off this needle." Or teP 
him to go and fetch you something ; nothing draws the 
thorn from the wound so soon as action ; soldiers do not 
feel their wounds in the heat of battle. "My nose is 
bleeding," says the youngest child, in a doleful tone. 
*'0, look at the pretty red blood, how it drops; where does 
it come from ? There was none in your little nose just 
now," you say ; and the pain is forgotten in the inquiry, 
— what is internal in what is external. Further: pro- 



MORAL EDUCATION OF BOYS. 283 

tect a child's ear even more carefully than his eye. The 
ear is especially the sense of fear; hence those animals 
which hear quickly are timid. As harmony holds the 
heart entranced in delight, so does the scream of fear in 
horror. An inexplicable sound is the true night for fear. 
The eye becomes at last reconciled to every monstrous 
form, if it only remain sufficiently long before it ; but the 
abyss of sound does not become clearer, but more dread- 
ful, by continuance. A little girl, to whom the color of 
the chimney-sweeper had only seemed curious, received 
the first fright in her life from hearing the uninterrupted 
noise of his sweeping. Give, therefore, to every strange 
noise, such as that of the wind, some merry name. Our 
age is the first that has made it a duty to devise rules 
against that fear which disarms and fetters mankind. In 
every child there lies, side by side with the romantic hope 
of an infinite heaven, the equally romantic dread of an 
infinite Orcus. But you hold this Orcus dreadfully open 
before the child, if you give this ideal fear an object by 
naming such a thing. The author committed this error 
by saying to his children, in order to prevent their hating 
and fearing soldiers or other people, " Only bad men are 
to be feared." Hereby their fear, previously scattered 
over various visible objects, was concentrated in the un- 
changing focus of a single invisible object ; and they car- 
ried this fancied bugbear with them everywhere, and 
saw it in everything. In no emotion of the soul — not 
even in love — does fancy push its creative and ruling 
power so far as in fear. Children, else religiously believ- 
ing all their parents say, anxiously desire the word which 
is to arm them against ghosts, and yet, with that very 
dictum on their lips, succumb to imagination in their 
hearts. Further: children who have Ions since exam- 



284 LEVANA. 

ined, and even themselves made, the object of their 
alarm, — a cloak, for instance, and a hat hung upon a 
stick, — will yet run away from it with terror. So they 
fear less what has already hurt them than what their 
parents, either by looks or words, have mentioned with 
fear ; a mouse, for instance. Therefore, especially avoid 
and guard against all suddenness of speech, — such as 
exclaiming in the night, " Look ! " or even " Listen ! '* 
which alarms yet more, — and of appearance or action ; 
for in that case the senses do not restrain, but only in- 
flame, the fancy, and the reality is wildly confused by the 
hasty explanation. Thus, alarm during thunder-storms 
principally arises from the rapidity with which the light- 
ning momentarily reveals the dark sky to the straining 
sight. If the whole firmament remained one long flash, 
we should fear it less. 

Do not merely spare children reading any painful his- 
tories, but also every verbal description of any unknown 
physical suffering ; for in children of a lively imagination 
mental fear easily springs out of bodily fear, and this 
— which is never considered — even through dreams. 
These gigantic chaotic painters in the mind form, out of 
the little terrors of the day, those monstrous masks of the 
Furies which wake and nourish the fear of ghosts which 
slumbers in every human being. We should attend far 
more to the dreams of children than to those of mature 
persons, especially on account of this difference, — that in 
ours resound the echoes of our childhood ; what then in 
theirs ? — Who has not experienced sudden presentiments, 
an inexplicable and perfectly unexpected foretaste of 
approaching good or ill fortune, wafted upon him like air 
Irom some mountain precipice ? Or who in new coun- 
tries, occurrences, or men has not sometimes found, deep 



MOKAL EDUCATION OF BOYS. 285 

within him, a mirror whereon, from old time, these very 
tilings were darkly pictured and beheld ? And to whom, 
in subsequent dreams and fevers, has not the same ser- 
pent form, the same misshapen, tortuous monster, con- 
tinually reappeared, of which, in his whole remembered 
life, he had beheld no archetype ? Might not these shapes 
be buried remnants of old childhood's dreams, which rise 
from the deep, like sea-monsters, in the night ? 

Be careful to conceal your own grief about others' 
necessities or your own. Nothing is more infectious than 
fear and courage ; but the parent's fear is doubled in the 
child ; for where the giant trembles the dwarf must surely 
fall. 

The father especially should never come before his 
children with a melancholy, penitential face, or the ap- 
pearance of much suffering, as if there were so much to 
lose in life that he could even lose himself: at most let 
him only point out a gloomy future, but not anxiety con- 
cerning it ; and at least let him have no other copies of 
his lamentations and " liber tristium " than one for his 
wife and friend. Yet the very opposite of this is most 
generally the case. It is in the house (as though every 
barricade and city wall must make people cowardly), in 
some hole in the shore, that the externally armed lobster 
casts his shell ; and it is in the nest with its poor little 
cues that the bold eagle moults, thus permitting them only 
to see its domestic cowardice, not its public courage. 
Rathor let every one resemble the pastor Seider, who, in 
reading the newspapers, lamented that of all the printed 
accounts of his sufferings not one was true. 

§ 107. 
Since indifference to actual blows and disregard of 
anticipated ones mutually strengthen each other, I hope 



286 LEVANA. 

I may continue to confound ihcra without reproach. 
Courage does not consist in blindly overlooking danger, 
but in meeting it with the eyes open. Therefore do not 
attempt to make boys brave by saying, " It will not hurt 
you," — for in that case the sheep would fight as bravely 
as the lion, — but by saying more truly, " What is it ? 
Only a hurt." For you may safely reckon on a some- 
thing in the human breast which no wounds can reach, 
on a steadfast celestial axle among the mutable earthly 
axles ; insomuch as man, unlike the beasts, has some- 
thing more than pain to dread. 

There is a courage manifested against the future and 
the imagination, and also a courage manifested against 
the present and the imagination : the one is opposed to 
fear, the other to terror. If there must be the one or 
the other, fear is, for children, preferable to terror, but 
not so for men ! If fear, as the Cardinal de Retz said, 
enfeebles and distorts the understanding more than all 
the other emotions of the mind, terror entirely destroys 
it, and puts madness in its place. Fear may be imparted 
so slowly and in so carefully measured doses, that it will 
rather act as an incitement than as a poison to thought 
and resolution. Whereas terror — whether inspired by 
sight or sound — is a flash of lightning shivering the 
whole man, unarming and slaughtering him at one 
stroke. Chiarugi * shows, on the authority of Giasone, 
that children who have been brought up harshly, and 
kept in order by images of terror, frequently fall vic- 
tims to insanity. 

One shock of terror may produce long-lasting fear; but 
fear cannot give birth to terror, for its imagination, dwell- 
ing on the future, finds even its present there. 
* See his work on Insanity, b. i. § 282. 



MORAL EDUCATION OF BOYS. 287 

With the exception of good health, there is no preserv- 
ative from terror save acquaintance with its object : it is 
produced only by what is new. The bravest may be 
terrified, as the Romans were by elephants, or as the 
bravest modern European might be by some strange, 
gigantic beast-like form, — dropped out of Jupiter, let us 
suppose, — whose poisonous quaUties and modes of attack 
he knew not. 

Then arm the young mind against the thunder-storms 
of accident by a lightning-conductor which you yourself 
make. The present assembly-hall for the sittings of col- 
leges and societies of learned men unfortunately helps 
them to pass through their sitting mode of life and death 
without becoming remarkably brave. It is a significant 
fact, that all important offices are marked by the appen- 
dage of a seat, — the bench of judges and of bishops, the 
chair of divinity, the stool of prayer, the seat of instruc- 
tion, — and their reward is rest in Abraham's bosom, or 
on the thrones of the twelve Apostles. He who sits when 
attacked by an enemy loses his courage, as is shown by 
every regiment awaiting an attack: and we run away 
with our heels, where alone the Homeric Achilles was 
vulnerable. But even in modern times the runner would 
be brave if no inimical runner pursued him. No Napo- 
leon could spend sufficient money in building golden 
oridges for a flying enemy. 

As a person can be really terrified only once by the 
same thing, I think it possible to spare children the real- 
ity by sportive representations of alarming circumstances. 
For instance : I go with my little nine-year-old Paul to 
walk in a thick wood. Suddenly three blackened and 
armed ruffians rush out and fall upon us, because I had 
hired them for the adventure with a small thieves* pre- 



288 LEVANA. 

mium the day before. We two are only provided with 
sticks, but the band of robbci-s are armed with swords and 
a pistol without bullets. Here nothing is of use but pres- 
ence of mind and resolution. One is opposed to three 
(for Paul must be reckoned as nothing, though I call 
upon him to fight) ; but because I turn away the pistol, 
60 that it may miss me, and strike the dagger out of one 
of the thieves' hand with my stick, and seize upon it to 
attack the tliird, I hoi>e that the ruffianly troop may be 
vanquished, and put to flight by one honest man with his 
eon's help. "We pursue the routed army for a little dis- 
tance, but soon desist as many stray shots are fired ; and 
I maintain a constant derision of the enemy's line, — 
which, like an orderly book-shelf, only shows the backs, 
— so that even my little ally can conclude for himself 
how much courage alone is superior to numbers, espe- 
cially of villains, who, according to all experience, are 
seldom brave. But (I add in this second edition) all 
such games are of doubtful advantage, because of their 
falsity ; and only by repetition can tliey altogether lose 
the evils attendant even on a fright which ends in noth- 
ing. A great many tales of victorious courage are, per- 
haps, better means of arousing and strengthening that 
virtue- 
Other " cloak and dagger pieces," as Bouterwek tells 
us the Spaniards call their intriguing comedies, might be 
tried advantageously in the night, in order to bring the 
fancies, inspired by a belief in ghosts, to common every- 
day light ; at the same time I admit that there is always 
a deep-seated fear of this kind, which only God, or the 
next world, can thoroughly remove. Even the fear of 
storms cannot be altogether eradicated, at least by rea- 
soning ; the tranquillity, or, still better, the cheerfulness, 



MORAL EDUCATION OF BOYS. 289 

01 grown-up persons during them is the best cure. Since 
what is uncommon is most dreaded, it may perhaps be 
numbered among the few advantages of a town-educa- 
tion, that in it the eye and ear of a child become indiffer- 
ent to more objects than they can do in a village. In 
nothing, fear itself scarcely excepted, does a man make 
such rapid advances as in courage. Night marches, the 
alliance of many boys, — for company increases courage 
as well as fear, — and finally the histories of true heroes, 
such as Charles XII. of Sweden, rivet the shield of 
courage more and more firmly on the breast. 

§108. 

Permit me still to add a few ingredients to the tonic 
medicines of manliness, ere I pass to the mental means 
of strengthening it. The following reflections may stand 
in the same relation as branches to the top of a tree. 

What, from the Fakeer to the martyrs of Christianity, 
of love, of duty, and to those who sacrificed their lives 
for liberty, has vanquished pain, opinion, desire, torture ? 
one ruling idea in the heart. Implant, then, in the boy 
some such living idea, were it but that of honor, and he is 
fit to become a man. Every fear may be overcome by 
placing it clearly before him. 

Every child pictures to himself some position, some 
trade, as the workhouse and sorrow of life ; and some 
other (usually his father's) as the belvidere of hope. 
Take from him these erroneous charts of heaven and hell, 
which, like warrants of arrest, disarm and render him the 
prisoner of fear and of desire. Bring him — not by dead 
listening, but by living observation — to a knowledge of 
the happiness of the most various conditions, so that he 
may look upon life as on the level ground of a pleasure 

13 A 



290 LEVANA. 

encampment, where even the slave has pitched his tent. 
It is much more important that a child should not cause- 
lessly dread and avoid any condition, however gloomy, 
than that he should not hopefully desire and labor after 
any, even the most brilliant ; for hope leaves us more un- 
derstanding and more happiness than fear. In order to 
extract from the tear-press of compassion some feeling 
and pence for a beggar, you choose to crush a power 
which could sustain itself on the beggar's pallet. What 
else do you do than cause the little shocked creature to 
prefer making a hundred beggars, in after life, to being 
one himself, and perhaps giving something to some other ? 
Always let oneness of purpose rule over a boy : he 
wanted, perhaps, to have, or to do, some certain thing ; 
oblige him, then, to take or to do it. And never com 
mand anything twice. 

Raise up in him by every possible means the conception 
of a higher tribunal than that of feeling. If he desire any 
forbidden thing, do not move it further from, but rather 
nearer to him, so that he may overcome that desire by 
the sense of duty. Place your command simply before 
him, without any attractive concomitants which may make 
it seem lighter than it is ; for, by this delicate conceal- 
ment of the rule, chance, which accustoms to nothing, is 
made master. The manner in which the command is 
obeyed is of infinitely more importance than the mere ful- 
filment of it. Neither veil a refusal, as mothers are too 
apt to do ; perpetual concealments are impossible. Why 
will you not spare yourself by a plain No, and accustom 
your boy to cheerful resignation ? Quiet submission to 
arbitrary despotism weakens the character, but to neces- 
sity strengthens it ; be then a fate to your child ! A 
child's obedience, without other consideration, can be of 



MORAL EDUCATION OF BOYS. 291 

no advantage to himself; for how if he obeyed all the 
world ? But it is the motive to it, as reverential, loving 
trust, and the perception of necessity, which ennobles him. 
Those who are obedient only from fear become mechanical 
automata, hypocrites, flatterers, and are totally ungoverna- 
ble when behind the back of their drivers. 

You bend (or break) the young mind if, before the age 
of insight into political inequalities, you teach it to pay 
other respect than what is due to every human being and 
to age ; unfettered by order-ribbons, blind to stars and 
gold, let the child regard both the servant and the master 
of his father with equal respect. A child is by nature a 
Diogenes to every Alexander, and a gentle Alexander to 
every Diogenes ; let him continue so ; never let that 
enervating humility towards rank approach him. 

Only great objects can worthily occupy a boy's heart ; 
and what, except knowledge, can fill it better than the 
love of his country, even though broken in the diamond- 
mortar of the present age ? This holy flame should be 
fanned in all schools, but certainly not after the method 
of Tyrtaeus, that is, by enthusiasm for a decrepit and 
justly fallen state, but by inspiration of the Hermann's 
Battle Odes of Klopstock. However, I scarcely expect 
this from the old humanists, who, in great works of art, 
take most pleasure in that which is most palatable in the 
elephant, the feet. 

No science has so many teachers as the science of hap- 
piness, or pleasure ; as if this had not already planted its 
throne in the hearts of cats, vultures, and, in short, of all 
other beasts. Will you then teach what the beasts know ? 
Shall the human mind, like a Centaur, enter the world of 
mind with a body bearing the marks of the spur ? For 
what reason — save a bad one — are the selfish excesses 



292 LEVANA. 

of children more indulged than those which display obfti- 
nacy, the love of eating more than the love of quarrelling, 
as if the teeth for tearing and those for chewing were not 
equally important ? If you seek to inspire reverence for 
pure worth, justice, and religion by any other means than 
the simple forms of these children of God, — were it 
merely by showing as an appendage some advantage 
thence derivable to the animal propensities, instead of 
teaching that they are due sacrifices to those goddesses, — 
then have you sullied the pure spirit, and made it little 
and^iypocritical. You, like the cold north, have suffered 
the lions of the south to shrivel up into cats, its crocodiles 
into hzards. 

If life is a battle, let the teacher be a poet, who may 
animate the boy to meet it with needful songs. Accustom 
him to regard his future, not as a path from pleasures 
(though innocent) to other pleasures ; nor even as a 
glea-ning, from spring-time to harvest, of flowers and 
fruits ; but as a time in which he must execute some long 
plan : in short, let him aim at a long course of activity, 
not of pleasure. Enjoyment soon wearies both itself and 
us ; effort, never. That man is happy, for instance, who 
devotes his life to the cultivation of an island, to the dis- 
covery of one that is lost, or of the extent of the ocean. 
In London it is he who was born rich, not he who has 
iiade himself rich, that commits suicide ; and, on the other 
side of the picture, it is not the poor man, but he who has 
become poor, that kills himself. The miser grows old 
enjoying rather than wearied of life ; but the heir who 
comes into possession of his active gains sinks into ennui. 
So I would rather be the court gardener who watches an- 1 
protects an aloe for fifteen years, until at last it opens to 
him the heaven of its blossom, than the prince wlio is 



MORAL EDUCATION OF BOYS. 293 

hastily called to look at the opened heaven. The writer 
of a dictionary rises every morning like the sun to move 
past some little star in his zodiac ; a new letter is to him 
a new year's festival, the conclusion of the old one a har- 
vest-home ; and, since after each capital letter the whole 
alphabet follows successively, the author on his paper may 
perhaps frequently celebrate on one and the same day a 
Sunday, a Lady-day, and a Crispin's holiday. 

Do not fear the rise of the sentiment of honor, which is. 
nothing worse than the rough husk of self-esteem, or the 
expanded covers of the tender wings which elevate above 
the earth and its flowers. But, to raise and ennoble that 
honor of the individual into honor of the race, and that 
again into honor for the worth of mind, never praise htm 
who has gained a prize, but those who rank below him ; 
give the honorable title, not as a distinction for the step* 
which have been mounted, but as a notification of neigh" 
borhood to what is higher ; and, lastly, let your praise 
afford more pleasure because you are pleased than t^e 
enjoyment of the distinction gives. 

§ 109. 

If man resembles iron in his strength, he also, by the 
inflammability of his passions, resembles that metal in 
connection with sulphur, at whose touch the hot bar^ of 
iron dissolves in drops. Does mere passion give strength? 
As certainly as a Parisian revolution gives freedon*, or a 
comet bright comet-lighted nights ; only they pass away 
again. The most powerful men of antiquity, the rulers 
or judges of their age, and the examples of all other agesj 
ever sprung from the Stoic school ; passions served them 
only as supports during storms, not as the beam of a 
balance ! 



294 LEVANA. 

As with the strength, so is it with the light which pas- 
sions, according to the declaration of Helvetius, ought to 
throw upon their objects ; it is, forsooth, just as Chateau- 
briand says, that in storms rocks shine with the foam of 
the waves, and so warn off ships : — very dear, and very 
changeful, light-houses ! 

Admit your boy, then, as much as possible into the 
Stoic school ; and that less by instruction than by the ex- 
ample of true Stoics of all ages. But that he may not 
mistake the Stoic for a Hollander, or even a stupid savage, 
let him see that the true inner fire of the breast glows 
most intensely in those men who manifest through life a 
steadfast will, and not, like the slaves of passion, various 
isolated ebullitions and desires : and name to him such 
men as Socrates and Cato, who were animated by a 
constant, but therefore tranquil inspiration. 

§ 110. 

This steadfast volition, which tranquillizes every mental 
tumult, does not presuppose any mere single object, but 
the grand final aim of life, — a high ideal, — which is the 
central sun of all its revolutions. It can, therefore, only 
produce a brave or great life ; but not a great or brave 
individual action : of this, indeed, every weakling is capa- 
ble. And so it never presents the spectacle of a lonely 
mountain, though there are such upon the earth, but it 
resembles those continuous chains of mountain-like clouds 
we see in the sky. 

An unchanging will can only aim at what is universal, 
at what is divine, be it freedom, or religion, or science, or 
art. The more divided the will is, the more is it liable to 
be disturbed by the outer world. As man — in opposition 
to the beasts, which only apprehend the single individuals 



MORAL EDUCATION OF BOYS. 295 

presented to their senses — extends and resolves the 
known world into various species, and his thoughts into 
categories, so does the ideal concentrate the desires in one 
general all-embracing effort. 

This ideal can be imparted by no education, — for it is 
our very inmost self, — but it must be presupposed, and 
so may be animated by all. Life is kindled only by life ; 
and the highest life can only be called into existence in a 
child by example, whether present or historical, or, which 
unites both, by poetry. 

The present living time cannot so easily purchase or 
find great men as little tin figures for children. But the 
distant history of the universe can furnish them to us : — 
we need but call to mind the soul-stirring contempt of life 
displayed in wars for freedom which would have immor- 
talized Plutarch, had he been its historian, as certainly 
as his ancient heroes ; — but it has found no Plutarch* 
Greatness, if not misrepresented, is yet forgotten ; and 
so, in the midst of the best present time, we yet need the 
mighty past, as birds of passage do the moonshine, to fly 
into warm countries. Parents and teachers and a few 
acquaintances are, unfortunately, placed before the grow- 
ing boy instead of the saints' images of the ideal, — bad 
and useless ! A lawgiver, or any man, who daily in the 
child's presence changes from dressing-gown to dress-coat, 
can never arouse that purest sentiment (which Chateau- 
briand considers wonder) in w^hose heights all the stars 
of the child's ideal move and shine. If children must 
pass behind the light of fair examples, why, O why 
should you give them gloomy instead of glorious ones ? 

But Clio, the Muse of the past, stands by you, and calls 
her father Apollo to her assistance. Only fill the boy's 
mind with the glorified world of heroes, with lovingly 



296 LEVANA. 

painted pictures of great men of every kind, and his in- 
born ideal will not first be called to life in the midst of 
that work-a-day ideal which also sleeps in every one. 

So let every poetic ideal shine free and bright belbre 
him ; his eye will not thereby be blinded to two greater 
ideals, — to that which his own conscience commands him 
to be, and to the idea of God. 

The educator, Campe, rightly recommends the illu- 
mined hemisphere of the present human race to be turned 
towards children: but certainly not that they may thereby 
learn patience towards the mediocre, — impatience were 
better, — but that the glory of the world, supposing it 
to come from dew-drops rather than jewels, may shine 
through their morning. What I consider dangerous, — ■ 
even more dangerous than the representation of man- 
devils, as every child daily hears of their hellish master 
without injury, — is, laying mixed characters before them 
from w^hich to select those worthy of imitation ; you might 
as well set a child to imitate his own similarly mixed 
nature. What else does a boy learn from that many- 
godded confederation-morality, but to apply the easy 
balance betw^een victory and defeat to himself? You 
might also apply much more closely the Gospel doc- 
trine of forbearance towards human infirmities, — namely, 
towards his own. 

Much that is very plausible and very prolix will be 
urged against this idealization of youth by pedagogic 
elephant-hunters, who hunt down what is great in order 
to have it tame, serviceable, and toothless in their stables. 
" All this is very fine, but only fit for the world of ro- 
mance. What can come out of such excessive straining 
of the young mind, but a vain contemplation and useless 
opposition to the real world, by which, nevertheless, 



MORAL EDUCATION OF BOYS. 297 

he must live, and which could scarcely be directed by the 
dreams of a visionary, or of a beardless boy ? There are, 
to use the language of novel-writers, neither phoenixes 
nor basilisks, but there are common land and water 
birds. In short, the young man must go forth into the 
world, as the old man has done, and learn to forget his 
empty giant images. Here again the middle is the right 
course ; that is to say, the youth may be told that men 
may possibly become so and so ; however, one mu^ not 
be too critical if they do not, but live for the state in 
which one lives : and again, that those ideal notions are 
only of value and use in so far as they manifest those 
qualities in connection with the available reality ; so, in a 
really allegorical sense, every scholar in Zurich, be he 
professor of divinity, law, or pedagogy, must yet be en- 
rolled member of some guild, that of the shoemakers, 
weavers, or some other trade. And only thus, and not 
otherwise, can citizens be given to their country worthy 
of their parents and teachers." 

That last I admit. But, good heavens ! would yon, 
then, help to weaken what the age and the world weaken 
without your aid ? You really act as if from after years, 
from the valley of life, gradual elevation, instead of de- 
pression, were to be expected, and men had not tissue 
forth and hasten over. Should you not treat the eyes of 
the mind at least as carefully as those of the body, before 
which at first you place the concave glasses which dimin- 
ish in the smallest possible degree, because afterwards 
tlieir use necessitates such as are more concave and di- 
minish more ? The worst that you labor to avoid is only 
that the youth hould exalt some reality into his ideal ; 
but the still worse thing that you endeavor to effect is, 
that he should darken and incorporate his ideal with 
13* 



298 LEVANA. 

reality. Oh ! there is enough of that without you. The 
ripe sunflower no longer turns its heavy seed-laden head 
towards the sun. The Ehine soon finds its plain, through 
which it creeps with no glittering waterfalls, and bears its 
burdens to Holland. What is all the gain the young 
soul can obtain from the avoidance of a few false steps, 
compared with the tremendous loss of the holy fire of 
youth, of its high-soaring wings, its great plans, without 
which it creeps as nakedly into cold, narrow life as most 
men creep out of it ? How can life ripen without the 
ideal glow of youth, or wine without its August? The 
best that men have done, if it have come in the late sea- 
son of life, has been but a late-growing seed which the 
tree of life in their childhood's paradise has borne : it is 
like the realized dreams of their youth. Have you nerer 
seen how a man has been governed and conducted 
throughout life by the one godlike image of his spring- 
time? With what else than the bread-cart of clever 
selfishness would you replace this guiding pole-star? 
Finally, what is the one thing needful to men ? Certainly 
not the strength of the sacrifices to what is best ; for let 
a god but once appear in reality, or, as in France, a 
goddess (liberty), and man willingly frees himself of 
everything human which the divinity does not require: 
but man needs something other than strength ; faith in, 
and contemplation of, a Deity who merits human sacri- 
fices of a nobler kind. But if you expel that ideal from 
the heart, there vanish with it temple, altar, and every- 
thing. 



T 



TRUTHFULNESS. 299 



CHAPTER II. 

TRUTHFULNESS. 
§ 111. 

RUTHFULNESS, — I mean the fact of speaking 
truth intentionally, and even to the injury of self, — 
is less a branch than a blossom of man's moral strength 
of character. Weaklings must lie, hate it as much as 
they may. One threatening look drives them into the 
midst of sin's net. The difference between the present 
and the middle age consists less in the existence of injus- 
tice, cruelty, and lust, — for these, especially the last, 
were abundant enough before the discovery of America, 
— than in the want of truthfulness. The first sin on the 
earth — happily the Devil was guilty of it, on the tree of 
knowledge — was a lie ; and the last will surely be a lie 
too. The world is punished for the increase of truths by 
the decrease of truthfulness. 

§112. 

Lying, that devouring cancer of the inner man, is mori 
severely judged and defined by the feeling of nations 
than by philosophers. The Greeks, who suffered their 
gods to commit as many crimes with impunity as their 
present representatives, the gods of the earth, do, yet 
condemn them for perjury — that root and quintessence 
of a lie — to pass a year of lifelessness under the 
ground in Tartarus, and then to endure nine years of 
torments. 

The ancient Persian taught his child nothing in the 
whole circle of morality but truthfulness. The gram- 



300 LEVANA. 

matic resemblance of his language to the Grerman beauti- 
fully shows also the moral resemblance of the people. 
Anton * tells us that lying is originally derived from to 
lie, i. e. to be prostrate, probably in reference to the ab- 
ject slave who dare raise neither body nor mind. Lying 
and stealing, (which, as an acted lie, deprives of honor, 
though murder does not,) and a box in the ear, which 
the ancient German dreaded more than a wound, are 
brought into close connection by our language in its 
proverbs : and our near relatives, the English, know of 
no more abusive epithet than liar. The German tourna- 
ments were closed to the liar as well as to the murderer. 
I grant, however, that in the greatest of all tournaments, 
Avar, the greatest lying opened the lists of knightly exer- 
cise in war to a prince, with whom no true treaty or 
peace could be made. 

Can this abhorrence of false words be merely grounded 
on the violation of mutual rights and confidence, and the 
injury arising from broken contracts ? It is contradicted 
by the fact that we more readily pardon lying actions than 
lying words. Action, mimicry, and silence lie far oftener 
than the tongue, which men endeavor as long as possible 
to preserve pure from the hateful perpetration of a lie, 
the plague-spot of the inner man. Heavens ! are we not 
already accustomed, without knowing it, to innumerable 
fictions of law and of poetry, — to political secret articles, 
mesne tenures, vice-men, masters of ceremonies, comedians, 
and rehearsals of comedies, false hair, false teeth, false 
calves, and many other things of a similar kind ; and yet 
are we thereby in the smallest degree less shocked - ■ en 
a man utters a deliberate lie? "What deceptions there are 

* This is more evident in the English than in the German, where 
the words are liigen derived from liegen. 



TRUTIIFULXESS. 301 

everywhere, from the otherwise lie-hating London, -vvhere 
three fourths of tlie current money is false,* to Pekin, 
where wooden hams are sold wrapped up in pig's-skin I 
Since an honorable soldier and gentleman is less ashamed 
of a fraud and a bankruptcy than of a lie, at the bare re 
proach of which he will shoot himself, — and since men of 
the world, and eyen moralists, permit themselves ambiguity 
of action rather than an actual lie, — and since, finally, no 
blush is caused by any sin so burning as that produced by 
a lie, — can words be something higher than deeds, the 
tongue than the band ? These questions cannot be per- 
fectly answered by the mimic ambiguity of actions, con> 
pared with the simplicity of speech ; for actions are no£ 
always arabiguoii:5, and men will often consider before 
speaking decidedly, when they would not before acting. 
Men are not ashamed to undermine and bear ill-wil) 
towards other men, but they are ashamed openly to tell 
a lie. 

§113, 

"What is it that makes it so unholy ? It is this : two 
individual beings are stationed with regard to each other 
as upon different island??, and locked up within prison-bars 
of the bonesy and behind the curtain of the skin. Mere 
motion shows me only life, but not its internal cause. The 
an i mated eye of a RaffaeMe's Madonna often speaks to us 
from the canvas, which yet houses no mind ; wax figures 
are hollow ; and the ape, our mocking image, is dumb*. 
In what glorified form, then, does the human soul reveal 
itself? In speech only; in reason, thus made man; in 
this audible freedom. I speak of universal innate lan- 
guage, without which all its peculiarities, such as modes 
of verbal expression, were neither compreheusib'e noi 

* Colq^uhomi. 



302 LEVANA. 

possible. Since instinct and mechanism can imitate all 
other signs of life, it is by speech only that the freedom 
of the creative thinker in a free world of thought is re- 
vealed to another; and this herald and ambassador of 
freedom lays the foundations of morality by announcing 
individuals, like kings, to one another. The fetters of the 
tongue are the fetters of the soul ; and there are no cus- 
toms, save the customs of language. The testament of 
the soul is opened by the mouth, and its last will made 
known. It is by the present conversion of mobile speech 
into quiet writing and painting, by this strict imprison- 
ment of the breath of the soul, that both the power of 
language and the blackness of a lie are visibly diminished. 
For, since everything is but a sign, it follows that every 
sign can be again signified even to infinity. 

But now if a fellow-being, another living soul, comes to 
me and utters a deliberate lie, how annihilating! His 
soul has fled away from me, and left but its fleshly house 
behind ; what he then says, since it is not the soul which 
speaks, is as meaningless as the wind, which, with all its 
howling, announces no pain. A word often effaces or 
explains an action ; but the reverse scarcely ever occurs. 
It must be a long course of action which will remove the 
thorn from one word, or restore the trusted use of the 
tongue. The whole enchanted palace of a man's thoughts 
is rendered invisible by the single blast of a lie, for one 
lie is the mother of all lies. What can I say to him who 
is, or carries about with him, his own talking-machine, 
and may have thoughts quite different to those he sounds 
on his machine ? Moreover, he gives me, what is no 
partial, but a universal injury, — instead of my soul, a 
machine, — instead of my truths, falsehoods ; and breaks 
down the bridge of mind, or at least converts it into a 



TRUTHFULNESS. 303 

bridge which he can let down for himself, but draw up 
against others. 

§ 114 
And now back to our dear children ! During the first 
five years they say neither what is true nor what is false, 
— they merely talk. Their talking is thinking aloud ; 
and since the one half of thought is frequently a yes, and 
the other a no, and both escape them (though not us), they 
seem to lie when they are merely talking to themselves. 
Further : at first they find great pleasure in exercising 
their new art of speech, and so they often talk nonsense, 
only for the sake of hearing their acquisitions in language. 
They frequently do not understand some word that you 
have said, — little children, for instance, often confuse to- 
day, to-morrow, yesterday, as well as numbers and degrees 
of comparison, and so give rather a mistaken than a false 
reply. Again, they use their tongues more in sport than 
earnest, as may be seen in the long discourses they hold 
with their puppets, as a minister or an author does with 
his ; and they easily apply this sportive talking to living 
people. Children always fly to the warm, sunny side of 
hope ; if the bird or the dog has gone away, they will say, 
without any further reason, it will come back again. And, 
since they cannot altogether separate their hopes, that is, 
their fancies, from copies of truths, their own self-decep- 
tion assumes the appearance of a lie. For instance, a 
truth-speaking little girl related to me frequent appear- 
ances of the infant Christ,* and what he had said, done, 
&c. It is worthy of consideration whether children, 
when they poetize a lie, do not often relate remem- 

* The infant Christ is, in Germany, feigned to be the sender of the 
presents which adorn the Christmas-tree. 



304 LEV AN A. 

bered tlrcam?;, which must necessarily be confounded by 
them with real occurrences. To this class belongs that 
talkative teasing and joking* often seen in eight or 
ten years old boys, which arises from superabundance 
of animal spirits. 

In all these cases, when the form of a lie is not to be 
shown in any dark glass, say merely, — " Don't make 
nonsense, speak seriously." 

Finally, an untruth about what is to come is often con- 
founded with an untruth about what has happened. Now 
if, in the case of grown-up men, we do not consider the 
breach of an official oath, having reference to the future 
only, equally culpable with the black perjury which re- 
lates to the past, we should in a still greater degree in the 
case of children, before whose little ken time and space 
are magnified, and to whom a day is as inscrutable as a 
year to us, clearly distinguish between the untruthfulness 
of promises and the untruthfulness of statements. Some- 
thing very different, and much worse, is the narrative-lie, 
which seeks to gain some future thing by lying. 

Truthfulness, which would offer even a bloody sacrifice 
to its word, as its word, is a godlike blossom on an earthly 
plant ; therefore, it is not the first, but the last virtue in 
order of time. The simple savage is full of deceit, both 
in words and actions ; tlie peasant, under the influence of 
some trifling danger, will tell a lie about what is past; but 
he considers it dishonorable to tell a prospective lie, and 
keeps his word. And yet you can require in a child, 
whom you have yet to educate, the last and noblest fruits 

* For the true liar does not joke, and the true wit does not lie, from 
the sharp open Swift back to Erasmus, who even experienced a phys- 
ical antipathy to a liar, as also to fish. — Pahavicini, Singulaiia de 
Viri$ Claria. 



TRUTHFULNESS. 305 

of truth ? How much you err is proved by the fact, that 
lying children — all other circumstances being equal — 
have grown up into truthful men : I appeal to the Rous- 
seau's ribbon-lie of every conscience. 

There are, however, two decided lies with regard to the 
two times ; — no other lies are possible than either those 
which look forward to the future or back to the past. 
Tiie first is seen when the child endeavors to secure itself 
some booty by lying words or deeds ; the second, "when 
he denies, through fear, his own actions. 

What is to be done in both these circumstances ? 

§ 115. 

What is to be done before they occur? That is the 
question. 

The child, blinded, and, as it were, imprisoned, by his 
own existence, acquires bis first knowledge of morality by 
observing others ; and only perceives the hatefulness of a 
heard lie, not of one spohen by himself. Show him^ then, 
the lofty throne of tnithfolness in others, compared with 
the abyss of their falsehood ; be what you desire him to 
be ; and frequently repeat that you do even the most 
indifferent things, because you had previously said yoo 
would. It has a powerful effect on the little heart if he 
occasionally hears his father, who seems to him a kind of 
hee universal monarch, complain; — but mark, it must 
only be in true cases, for truthfulness in the child cannot 
irrow at the expense of truthfulness in the parents : that, 
for instance, he would rather not go out with him, but 
having promised to do so, he must now unwillingly keep 
his word. 

If the child have promised something, remind him fre- 
quently of it as the time approaches, but without usia^ 



3o6 LEVANA. 

Other words than " you said so," and at last compel him 
to the performance. But if he have done something, you 
cannot be too sparing in your inquiries, which may easily 
become so painful. The younger the child is the fewer 
questions you ought to ask, the more ought you to seem 
all-knowing or remain ignorant. Do you not consider 
that you apply a fiery trial, such as Huss and other 
martyrs have endured, to children, — to whom a threat- 
ening father is a penal judge, a prince, and a fate, his rod 
a Jove's thunderbolt, and the next questioning moment an 
eternity of hellish torments, — when, by your concealed 
anger, and the prospect of punishment after confession, 
you place them in the dangerous position of choosing 
whether they shall obey instinct or an idea ? To truth 
belongs freedom ; the criminal stands without fetters dur- 
ing trial ; and man, the reverse of Proteus, speaks the 
truth when free. The more free the education, the more 
truthful is the child. All truth-loving ages and nations, 
from the German to the British, have been free : lying 
China is a prison, and romanizare (romancing) meant 
lying when the Romans were slaves. 

At the same time do not let the remission of punish- 
ment be the incitement and reward of truth ; an act of 
indemnity, which can as little make the child good and 
true, as escaped suffering the unpunished thief. If you 
must inquire, use affectionate words, and apply to the lie 
the pain you would spare the child. 

But if a lie be proved against the child, solemnly utter 
the judgment "guilty of lying," with a shocked tone and 
look, w^ith all the horror due to this sin against nature and 
the Holy Ghost, and inflict the punishment. The only 
punishments I would permit for lying are such as affect 
the honor, and can be removed as solemnly, suddenly, and 



TRUTHFULNESS. 307 

completely as inflicted, so as not to lose their effect by 
gradnal diminution. The Iroquois blacken the faces of 
those who celebrate their heroes with lying songs. The 
Siamese sew up the lips of lying women, as if they were 
wounds. I have nothing to say against the blackening ; 
on the contrary, I have myself occasionally punished a 
lie severely by marking a spot of ink on the brow, which 
was not to be washed off without permission, and which 
eat deeply into the conscience. But I am more in favor 
of the Siamese plan of closing the lips, — I mean of forbid- 
ding speaking to those who have spoken wickedly. The 
same principle which led the ancient Germans to cut out 
the tongues of the Roman advocates, sends the misused 
member, which serves the mind worse than the stomach, 
into the convent of La Trappe. I think this punishment 
which petrifies the tongue, as Paul did the serpent at 
Malta, is juster, lighter, and more definite than that 
which Rousseau and Kant would inflict on a lying child ; 
namely, not to believe him for a time, which only means 
to seem not to believe him. For in this case the judge 
himself lies during the punishment for lying ; and will 
not the little culprit arrive at the knowledge of this pre- 
tence by his consciousness of speaking the truth ? More- 
over, how and when will you make the necessary return 
from disbelief to confidence ? At the same time, Kant's 
punishment may occasionally have a beneficial tendency 
in the case of grown-up daughters. 

Never tell any child under six years old to conceal 
anything, even though it were a pleasure you were plan- 
ning for some one you love. The clear sky of childlike 
open-heartedness must not be covered even by the morn- 
ing glow of shame ; and your instructions will soon teach 
him to add secrets of his own to yours. The heroic 



3o8 LEVANA. 

virtue of silence requires for its practice the powers of 
ripening reason. Reason teaches us to be silent; the 
heart teaches us to speak. 

For this and other reasons I consider it wrong, at 
least for the first five years, to forbid a child to ask for 
anything ; especially if the mother append the poison- 
ous sugar of a promise to give it afterwards. For, are 
wishes sins ? or is the confession of a wish a sin ? 
During the silence attached to the gift, will not a long- 
ing for enjoyment and reward, and the power of dis- 
simulation, be maintained and fostered ? And is it not 
much easier to give an entire refusal after the short 
question, than after the long waiting ? This mistaken 
command arises from the maternal inability to utter an 
immediate and decisive " no." 

Do not despise all kinds of little helps. For instance, 
do not press the child for an immediate answer ; a lie 
easily escapes from haste, and must then be supported 
by another. Give him a little time for reflection before 
he speak. Further, remember in your most indifferent 
promises and declarations — and all the more because 
they are indifferent to you — that children have a bet- 
ter memory than you about all things, but especially 
for and against you, and that you must protect them 
from the dangerous appearance of your own innocent, 
over-hasty untruthfulness. 

The author has occasionally asked himself whether 
children's sense of truth may not be injured by the acting 
oi charades and little comedies. Besides the necessary 
excitement of instant creation, children's charades have 
also this advantage over children's comedies, — that mere 
charades are only a higher imitation of the puppet 
games which children, even at an earlier age, played 



TRUTHFULNESS. 309 

extempore with their dolls and their companions, with- 
out any injury to truthfulness ; as if, even then, they 
would take refuge from the cold winds of real life 
behind the shelter of imaginary life. In charades the 
child lives, — at once poet and player ; in a strange 
character, it is true, but still not in a borrowed one, 
and uttering the words prompted by the eager moment. 
In plays he coldly learns by heart the representation 
{simulatio) of a character, and certain words, in order 
afterwards to give a lively representation of both. Truth 
has also this advantage in charades ; that the child must, 
at all events, reply from his own mind to the changing 
questions of the time ; whereas, in a learnt comedy, he 
brings with him every answer, prepared for weeks. And 
since even great actors do not consider the advantage to 
be gained by pure, universal human nature, without 
regard to artistic effect, as the matter of chief importance, 
we should exempt children from an exercise in which 
the advantage is more doubtful than the injury. 

Our ancestors magnified every lie into perjury, by 
always pointing out to children the universal presence 
of God : and why should not this warning, which converts 
every promise into an oath, and doubles the sin while 
rendering it more difficult of commission to a conscience 
alive to the Divinity, be still held up to children ? 

Finally, since truthfulness, as a conscious virtue and 
sacrifice, is the blossom, nay, the pollen, of the whole 
moral growth, it can only grow with its growth, and 
open when it has reached its height. You have only 
to keep away weeds while you give it freedom, save it 
from overpowering temptations, and forbid all soul-bend- 
ing customs (such as obliging a child to return thanks 
for a whipping, and to make compliments to strangers). 



3IO LEVANA. 



CHAPTER III. 

EDUCATION OF THE AFFECTIONS. 

§116. 
SAID, in the hundred and third section, that love 



I 



is the second hemisphere of the moral world, that 
it turns to what is external, as honor does to what is 
internal, and so forth. The holy essence of love has 
been fathomed neither by the fraternity of novelists, 
who, like selfish women, mingle regard to self with the 
beloved object, nor by merely intellectual philosophers, 
who view its depth partly as an instinct utterly without 
and below their categorical imperative, (law of morals,) 
partly as mere justice, a kind of rational regard ; to 
such men love and poetry seem a pair of superfluous 
wings, disfiguring the useful arms behind which they are 
placed. Only Plato, Hemsterhuis, Jacobi, Herder, and 
a few like them, have brought to the love of wisdom 
(philosophy) the wisdom of love. He who called love 
the positive law of morality will, at least, not be con- 
demned by one great man, — by Jesus Christ, the founder 
of the first religion of love, in the midst of a Judaism 
inimical to all other nations, and an age inimical to phi- 
lanthropy. But the essence of love — this all-sustaining 
deity, the true divine unity of all, in which the individual 
soul feels more than it comprehends — demands another 
place for examination. 

§ 117. 

Love is an innate, but variously apportioned, power 
and warmth of the heart ; there are cold and warm- 



EDUCATION OF THE AFFECTIONS. 311 

blooded souls as well as bodies. Many are born knights 
of the Love of their Neighbor,* as Montaigne ; many 
are armed neutrals against humanity. Whether this 
power be a holy, burning bush, or only a single kindling 
sprt , education must care for it in two ways, — by pro- 
tecting and by developing it. 

By protecting it I mean this. The child begins with 
selfishness, which affects us as little as that of animals ; 
because the soul, darkly hidden under its various wants, 
cannot yet feel its way to another, but incorporates 
others, so to speak, with itself. In so far the child finds 
nothing lifeless without, any more than within, itself; it 
spreads its soul as a universal soul over everything. A 
little girl of two years old — and all children do the 
same — personified other things than those I mentioned 
in the earlier part of this work : she said, for instance, 
of the door which was opened, " It wants to go out." — 
" I will kiss my hand to the spring." — " Is the moon 
good ? and does it never cry ? " This animation of all 
lifeless things, which is peculiar to children, is another 
reason why we ^^hould restrain them from ever harshly 
alluding to an inanimate object. 

§ 118. 

Love in the child, as in the animal, exists as an 
instinct ; and this central fire frequently, but not always, 
breaks through its outer crust in the form of compassion. 
A child is often indifferent, not merely to the sufferings 
of animals, and to those of persons unconnected with 
himself, (except when the cry of pain finds an echo in 
his own heart,) but even to those of relatives. Inno- 

* The order of knighthood to which I allude was founded by th« 
Queen of Charles III. of Spain. 



312 LEVANA. 

cent children will frequently find pleasure in standing 
on the place where another is to be punished. A sec- 
ond observation, founded on experience, is, that boys, 
when approaching near to manhood, show the least af- 
fection, the most love of teasing, the greatest destructiv^- 
ness, the most selfishness and cold-heartedness ; just as 
the coldness of the night increases twofold shortly before 
the rising of the sun. 

But the sun comes, and warms the world ; the super- 
abundance of power becomes love ; the strong stem 
encloses and protects the pith ; the teasing lad becomes 
the affectionate young man. The other observation of 
childish heartlessness, recorded above, vanishes in the 
very opposite quality of tenderness, so soon as the visi- 
ble pain of the culprit, by its increase, affects the child ; 
every fresh wound makes a tearful eye. 

Consequently, there is not so much need to ingraft 
the buds of affection, as to remove the moss and briers 
of selfishness which hide them from the sun. Every- 
body would gladly show affection, might he, or dared he, 
but do it. Wherever a pulse beats, a heart reposes in 
the background ; if there be but some little impulse 
towards love, the whole essence of love lies behind it. 

But you plant the selfish weed, instead of eradicating 
it, if, in the presence of children, you pass contemptuous, 
though just, judgments on your neighbors, or even your 
town. How else can the child learn to love the world, 
than by learning to love what is daily around him ? And 
can we love what w^e despise ? Or will your sermons 
warm him into love for the objects you have taught him 
to scorn? Since every distinction of your children 
above their neighbors, whether it consists in position, 
behavior, or even more brilliant instruction, reminds 



EDUCATION OF THE AFFECTIONS. 313 

thera of themselves at the expense of others, this dis- 
tinction very soon and very easily passes into hatred. 
Never say to your children that other children are ill 
brought up. I have frequently seen whole families con- 
verted, by similar thoughtless and perverse actions, into 
watchful and blockading troops of hatred ; whole houses 
built full of pouting-corners, where every child, full of 
itself, regarded its own demands as the weights, those of 
others as the goods to be weighed, and expected uni- 
versal love and admiration. If a large town have the 
injurious effect on children's hearts of compelling them 
to assume the neutrality of great people, because so many 
of whom they are ignorant, and to whom they are indif- 
ferent, constantly pass before them, much more must 
a village harm them, if they hate and despise as many 
people as they know, that is to say, everybody. 

The simple command, " Forgive the sinner," means, 
with children. Do not regard him as one : you will suc- 
ceed better if you teach them to distinguish the guilty 
accompUce, — self, from its stains ; to judge the deed, 
not the doer ; in order, especially, by the comparison of 
things and rights, to prevent, or to exalt, the comparison 
of persons. Praise the action, not the child. Parents 
mention their children too often by name. Do not say, 
** Ah, the good little Louisa ! " but say, " That is good,'* 
— or, at most, " You are as good as Mary," 

§ 119. 

But while setting forth the repression of selfishness as 
the one thing needful for exciting kindliness to others, we 
must observe — as is just — that love requires nothing, 
save not to be obstructed. This leads us to the second 
means of maintaining and exciting love : it is this, — 
14 



314 LEVANA. 

place another being in sufficiently close and living con- 
tact with your child, and he will love it ; because man is 
so good, that the Devil, so to speak, has only carved and 
placed a black frame round the divine image. The stenc 
of the individual heart nourishes with the same sap it;j 
own branches and those which are ingrafted on it. 

The means of exciting love consist in identifying the 
child, as it were, with the life of others, — and in rever- 
ence for life under every form. 

Concerning this transposition into extraneous life, by 
which alone the goodness of our nature can unfold all 
its love, little needs here be printed, because I have 
already printed much about it.* Individuals, yea, whole 
nations, have often died without having once even thought 
of themselves in any other position than their own ; how 
difficult, then, must it be for the child to place himself in 
the position of others ! Man usually opens himself to 
the reception of another's nature only, when, in the con- 
test between two other persons, he must transpose him- 
self from the one into the other ; but not, when he is 
a party concerned in the contest, by placing himself in 
the position of his opponent. Moreover, this represent- 
ative method of viewing our neighbor is a kind of 
intuition, and, consequently, not always in our own power. 
I do not attempt to decide whether, possibly, older chil- 
dren may not be led to attain this intuitive perception 
at an earher period than they else would, by certain 
games ; where one child, for instance, assumed the name, 
and imitated the actions, of another ; or, by colored pic- 
tures, calling to mind similar situations. But there is 
something else which may be done to attain this end, 
with better hope of success. 

* In the Life of Siebenkas, Book I. 



EDUCATION OF THE AFFECTIONS. 315 

§120. 

It is this: teach a child to consider all animal lift 
sacred, — in short, give him the heart of a Hindoo, not 
the heart of a Cartesian philosopher. 

I here speak of something higher than compassion for 
animals, though of that also. Why has it been long re- 
marked that children's cruelty to animals predicts cruelty 
to men, as the Old-Testament sacrifices of beasts fore- 
shadowed the New-Testament sacrifice of a man ? It is 
certain that, unless associated with other things, the little 
human being can only sympathize with those sufferings 
which speak in tones similar to his own. Consequently, 
the unusual cry of a tortured animal sounds to him only 
like the strange and amusing howl of the inanimate wind; 
but, as he sees life and voluntary motion, and even attrib- 
utes to them inanimate forms, he sins against life when 
he separates them as though they were but machinery. 
Life itself should be sacred ; every life, irrational as well 
as any other. And does the child, in fact, know of differ- 
ent kinds of life ? Or is the heart beating under bristles, 
feathers, or hard wing-covers, therefore any the less a 
heart ? 

Permit me a few words about the love of animals, and 
universal reverence for life ! 

Once, when man, a new and fresh creature, lived in the 
full world where one stream flows into another, he recog- 
nized in everything the universal life of the Godhead, 
resembling an infinite tree of life, which spreads the low- 
est insects, like roots, into the earth and sea, stands firm 
and strong witn a trunk of huge powerful beasts, shoots 
into the air with boughs full of waving leaves, and finally 
puts forth men — its tender blossoms — towards the sky. 
Then had not arisen that stupid human egotism which 



3l6 LEVANA. 

thinks that the whole animal kingdom, the peopled seas 
and deserts full of all their various happy living creatures, 
were given by God to men as tributary beasts, Michael- 
mas geese and tithe hens for their stomachs. The earth, 
Kepler's animal, had not yet become the metallic cow 
and the Balaam's ass of little man. But the old van- 
ished world, — some remnants of which are yet visible in 
"Eastern India, — finding more life and more divinity in 
\he flower, fast chained by its roots, than we now do in 
the free-moving beast, worshipped, in animal arabesques, 
in the living, moving, distorted images of the human form, 
the infinite RafFaelle who perfected man. The forms of 
animals repulsive to us revealed to them the veil of Isis, 
or the Moses' covering of a deity. Hence the lower, but 
wonderful, beast * was worshipped much sooner than the 
human being; hence the Egyptians crowned human bodies 
with the heads of animals. The more childlike, simple, 
and pious a nation, the greater its love of animals. In 
Surat there is an hospital for animals. The hero who 
had taken Nineveh, saved it from destruction, because of 
the multitude of its animals. The mercifulness of the 
Jews t towards animals was rewarded with long life. 
Even the punishment of animals, if they had participated 
with men in any crime, the thunders of excommunication 
hurled against them, and the weighing of their designs I 
in inflicting punishment, show the early regard felt foi 
these eighth parts and likenesses of man. The Indian 
adoration of vegetable life passed into Greece, under 

* Vide Meiners. 

t Michaelis, ^losaic law, v. iii. 

X An ox which, among the Jews (according to the Gcmara), was 
put to death for kilhng a Jew, but left unhurt after killing three 
heathens, was equally unpunished if he aimed at goring a heathiu, bui 
killed a Jew. — Mischna, 6. Bafa kama, c 4. 



EDUCATION OF THE AFFECTIONS. 317 

the form of Ilamadiyads and other deities dwelhng in 
trees, and into the north under the form of punishment to 
all who injured trees. 

I have often pictured to myself situations which would 
remove the common daily view of animals, which, like 
missliapen human bodies, have fallen on to our globe 
from other worlds producing different forms. For in- 
stance ; I have fancied an uninhabited island, on which 
one man, nourished only by the bread-fruit-tree, had 
eeen no living thing, nothing but waves and sky and 
his own reflection in the water, and from which he wa3 
suddenly transported to a country peopled with animated 
beings. 

What an enchanted island full of embodied sprites and 
fairies ! To the islander, who knows no other form than 
his own, a hairy monkey grinning at him from a bough 
would seem a wicked spirit, or a misshapen man. The 
elephant approaches, — a shapeless living mass, a whole 
family compressed into one huge two-eyed body, — a 
walking island of flesh : the lion comes like anger : the 
horse flies like victorious pride : little mad sprites, red, 
green, yellow, and six-footed, flutter about the island. A 
glorious wonder drops from the clouds, in w^hich the two 
strong useful human arms are changed into burnished 
gold hair or feathers, and its lips drawn out into a horn. 
Gray, shapeless substances, with scarce formed limbs, 
swim in the waters : yellow creatures, like the masks of 
the furies, crawl about in the marshes: a single long, 
smooth limb creeps up and pricks the wicked spirit on 
the bough, and he falls down : and then, when these 
strange dream-like figures began to speak each the lan- 
guage of an unknown world, — as we might suppose the 
various nations of its planets assembled in the markelr- 



3l8 LEVANA. 

place of their sun, — liumming, screaming, howling, 
laughing, — there, on the bough of a tree, sweet sounds, 
from heaven, at its root wrathful hissings from Erebus : 
and then the battles and struggles of these animals, the 
injuries inflicted on them by each other, and yet their 
continued existence : and, finally, this mingled, fluttering, 
liurting, killing, caressing, reproducing life becomes an 
infinite breath of life, wherein the individual life flies like 
a tiny zephyrette .... The one human soul forgets in 
itself the human race of the past, the present, and the 
future, and places itself as the first figure before all 
others. How much more does it forget the inferior race 
of animals, the mouches voJanles before an angel's eyes ! 

The so-called instinct of animals — this ass which per- 
ceives the angel's presence sooner than the prophet — 
ought to be regarded as the greatest miracle of creation, 
and also as the key and index to all other miracles ; in so 
much as the riddle of the universe resembles those riddles 
which both describe the riddle and signify it. Animals 
should be rendered familiar to children in every possible 
way ; for instance, by representing them as an anagram 
of a human being : thus the poor dog may be regarded as 
an old hairy man, whose mouth has become blackened 
and elongated, his ears pulled out, long nails appended to 
his shaggy paws, and so forth. Little animals must be 
brought nearer to the eye and heart by means of a mag- 
fying-glass. Thus we may become the friends of the 
denizens of a leaf. The prejudice which values life by 
the yard — why, then, are not elephants and whales 
ranked higher than ourselves ? — disappears by the con- 
templation of the infinity which is the same in every 
living creature, and, like an infinite series in numbers, is 
increased by no finite additions; which is not aflTected, 



EDUCATION OF THE AFFECTIONS. 319 

for instance, by the two million joints of a centipede, or 
the many thousand muscles of the willow-caterpillar. 
" How you would take care of a butterfly as big as an 
eagle, or of a grasshopper as large as a horse ! And are 
not you little too? " Speak thus to the child ! 

Leibnitz replaced a little insect which he had exam- 
ined for a long time uninjured on its leaf: be this a com- 
mand for a child. The Stoic school declared, that a man 
who killed a fowl without any reason would just as readily 
kill his father : and the Egyptian priest considered it 
impious to destroy any animal except for sacrifice. 
These embody all the commandments of regard for life. 
Let animals be put to death only from necessity, as sacri- 
fices, accidentally, hastily, involuntarily, defensively. If 
the long observation of some animal, — say a frog, — of 
its breathing, jumping, mode of life, and agonies, have 
converted this little animal, previously indifferent to the 
child, into a really living thing, he would by kilhng it 
destroy with its life his reverence for all life. Hence no 
domestic animal, a sheep, a cow, should ever be killed in 
a child's presence ; at all events, if his rising love of ani- 
mals is to be encouraged, instead of repressed (as some 
nations have been led to eat men from eating monkeys) ; 
the hard necessity of the case, the careful tending pre- 
viously, and the sudden, easy death, must be cast as a veil 
of darkness over the slaughtering hand. Even a hunter 
should never punish his hounds with true hunter's cruelty 
before a child, especially, because their cries express their 
pain so clearly. Cooks say you should show no pity in 
killing an animal, for else it dies harder : this superstition 
at once reveals and hides the true woman's sympathy, 
which it forbids. 

To the child's eye, admit all living things int<? the 



320 LEVAXA. 

human family ; so the greater reveals to him t^e less. 
Breathe a living soul into everything ; and even describe 
the lily, which he wantonly tears from its organic exist- 
ence, as the daughter of a fair mother who stands in the 
bed and nourishes her little white child with sap and dew. 

I do not refer to ^ny mere empty exercise of compas- 
sion in the school of others' sufferings, but to an exercise 
of religion in the conse^^ration of life, of the deity ever 
present in the trees and iix the human brain. The love 
of animals, like maternal love, arises from no expectation 
of reciprocated advantage, stilJ less from selfishness, and 
has the further advantage of always nnding an object on 
which to manifest itself. 

Oh! the beautiful time will, must come, when the 
beast-loving Brahmins shall dwell in the cold north and 
make it warm ; when the heart, having rejected its worst 
and cruellest sins, shall also lay aside those which slowly 
poison it ; when man, who now honors the multiform part 
of humanity, shall also begin to spare, and finally to pro- 
tect, in the present, the animated ascending and descend- 
ing scale of living creatures, so as no more to offer to the 
Great First Cause the hateful sight of, it is true, thickly 
veiled, but wide-extended, animal suffering. And where- 
fore must such times come ? Because worse times have 
passed away : time carries away the national debts 
(mostly bloody debts) of humanity . strand-right is now 
strand-wrong ; the traflfic in negroes is gradually becom- 
ing unlawful. Only the toughest, harshes* barbarism of 
past ages — war — remains yet to be vanquished by ouj 
innate anti-barbarism, 

§ 121. 
The third love-potion, like the third degree of com- 



EDUCATION OF THE AFFECTIONS. 32I 

parison which admits of no more, is love for love. If 
love be the highest, what further can it seek than itself, 
the highest? A heart can only be held by a heart, 
the fairest setting of the loveliest jewel. Only the 
tumult and confusion in the nest of self can so darken 
us that we value pure love for another less than that 
for ourselves. 

But do not attempt to found this love in children by 
caresses, the thirsty springs of love. These soon both 
grow cold and make cold. I have often seen children, 
especially young ones, suddenly start away from the 
caresses of love to the quietest observation of some mere 
trifle, just like the old epic poets of early nations in their 
descriptions. In grown-up persons, that would betray a 
withered heart which in children only shows that its buds 
are still closed. 

You reveal the form of love to a child less by self- 
sacrificing actions — for these he, as yet unreasoning and 
selfish, does not regard — than by the mother tongue of 
love, affectionate words and looks. Love, to appear un- 
troubled, must be embodied in nothing save the tender 
mimicry taught by Nature herself: a look, a word, ex- 
presses it directly, a gift only indirectly, by translation. 
And just so in marriage : love is not preserved by gifts, 
])leasures, and sacrifices, whose influence soon disappears, 
but by words and looks of love. Moreover, children 
manifest more love towards present-giving strangers than 
to present-giving parents ; but, on the contrary, not so 
much to caressing strangers as to caressing parents. 

Let the child occasionally see the fiery pillar of love 
move before strangers. Contemplation of the mutual 
love of others sanctifies the beholder, because it cannc t be 
accompanied by selfish desires. But there is one evil 

14=^ U 



322 LEVANA. 

attending this ; namely, that the undeveloped hearts of 
children either behold the altar-flame of others' love with 
indifference, or frequently, if their parents kindle it, even 
with jealousy. But this only teaches us that in educa- 
tion, as well as in art, every violent expression, even of 
what is most excellent, must be shunned (because the 
injudicious excess makes a durable impression, but the 
beautiful fugitive idea is lost), and that quietness and 
gentleness reflect the affectionate heart most clearly. 
And I ciin assure brides, and still more certainly bride- 
grooms, that they will only find the children of affectionate 
parents affectionate ; and especially that a kind or an 
unkind father propagates love or hatred in his children. 

If love were not natural to us we could never hate. 
It is true that in us, as in other animals, hate manifests 
itself earlier, and at first more powerfully than love. 
This may in part be thus accounted for : in attraction or 
resemblance some portion of another's excellence is lost 
to sight by its mixture with our own, whereas the repul- 
sion of what is dissimilar at once markedly separates our 
good from others' evil qualities ; the heart, full of ideal 
light, feels the cold shadow of another's worthlessness 
more sensibly than the light which is lost in the blaze 
of his own. But if love is innate, and if the heart is, 
as Descartes calls the earth, an incrusted sun {soleil 
encroute), you have but to break away the crust, and the 
glowing warmth is there. In other words, let the child 
learn to know love by his own actions, as reversedly, to 
understand your actions by love ; that is to say, let him do 
something for you so that he may love something ; for in 
children action awakens desire, though the opposite is the 
case with men. 

You may teach a higher than Ovid's Art of Love, by 



EDUCATION OF THE AFFECTIONS. 323 

requesting your child to do something without command- 
ing, or rewarding performance, or punishing neglect ; 
only depict beforehand, if it is for another, or afterwards 
if for yourself, the pleasure which the little actor's atten- 
tion to your wish affords. You excite the benevolence of 
children less by pictures of people's necessities than of the 
joy produced by relieving them. For the little heart 
conceals so great a treasure of love, that he is less defi- 
cient in willingness to make sacrifices than in the cer- 
tainty that they would give pleasure. Hence, when 
children have once begun to make presents they would 
never cease giving. The parents may give them the 
reward of certain happiness by a gladly praising ap- 
proval ; an educational lever whose power has not been 
sufficiently estimated. For children, accustomed only to 
parental bidding and forbidding, are made happy by per- 
mission to do some extra service, and by the recognition 
of their having done it. This affectionate acknowledg- 
ment of pleasure renders them neither vain nor empty, 
but full ; not proud, but warm. 

" It does the poor man, or dog, or whatever it may be, 
good, or harm." These few words, said in a proper tone 
of voice, are worth a whole sermon : and fie ! said to a 
girl, will abundantly fill the place of half a volume of 
Ehrenberg's Lectures to the female sex. 

Moreover, the author does not attempt to hide from 
the police, that, in the presence of his children, he has 
frequently given to beggars ; first, because the appear- 
ance of cruelty cannot be removed by any political rea- 
sons, nor is attempted to be ; and, secondly, because a 
child's heart, excited by compassion for suffering, should 
not be chilled. 

Yet a few fragments within the frajzment ! Do not 



3H 



LEVANA. 



apprehend too great danger to the aflfections from chil- 
dren's quarrels. The circumscribed heart of children, 
their incapacity to place themselves in another's position, 
and their Adam-like innocence of belief that the whole 
world is made for them, not they for the world ; all these 
things combine to raise the inflated bubbles which soon 
break of themselves. They may speak harshly, or even 
fly into a passion, with one another, but must not continue 
it ! You must do many more things to be hated than to 
be loved by children : hated parents must themselves 
have hated for a long time. Advancing years rarely 
awaken a repressed or dormant love ; the individual's 
own selfishness doubles that of others, and this again 
redoubles that ; and so layer upon layer of ice is frozen. 
You falsify love by commanding its outward expression ; 
— kissing the hand, for instance. Such things, unlike 
kind actions, are not the causes, but only the effects, of 
love. Do not in any instance require love : among 
grown-up persons would a declaration of affection, if 
commanded and prescribed by the highest authorities, be 
well received ? It may be again repeated, without de- 
serving blame, that the quickest alternation between pun- 
ishment or refusal and previous love is the true, though 
(to the fair sex) a difficult art of educating the aff*ections. 
No love is sweeter than that which follows severity ; so 
from the bitter olive is sweet, soft oil expressed. 

And, finally, ye parents, teach to love, and you will 
need no ten commandments ; teach to love, and a rich, 
winning life is opened to your child : for man (if this 
simile be permitted) resembles Austria, which increases 
its territory by marriage, but loses its acquisitions by war: 
teach to love, in this age, which is the winter of time, and 
which can more easily conquer everything than a heart 



APPENDIX ON 3I0KAL EDUCATION. 325 

by a heart ; teach to love, so that when your eyes are old, 
and their sense almost extinguished, you may yet find 
round your sick-couch and dying-bed no greedy, covetous 
looks, but anxious weeping eyes, which strive to warm 
your freezing life, and lighten the darkness of your last 
hour by thanks for their first : teach to love, I repeat ; 
that means, — do you love ! 



CHAPTEK IV. 

SUPPLEMENTARY APPENDIX TO MORAL EDUCATION. 

§ 122. 

WHAT is the third which unites love and honor, 
which does not suffer love weakly to sacrifice the 
sacred rights of the individual soul, nor honor to disre- 
gard that of others in the cold contemplation of its own ? 
— Religion. 

Since every distinguishing quality is again subdivided, 
we find that the natural distinctions of the sexes, the one 
inclining more to honor, the other to love, are repeated in 
the same sex. This is a very important point in female 
education. One girl is all quickness of perception and 
action, full of truthfulness and impatience, her personal 
and her public honor is ever before her eyes, — forgiving 
only her own severity, not that of others, but even that, 
more readily than any unworthy attack on her honor, — 
reflecting on her own worth rather than duly weighing it, 
placing justice higher than love, and so forth. Another 
girl is full of affection, often even to the prejudice of her 



326 LEVANA. 

lionor, desirous of approbation, not proud, less obedient to 
the dictates of propriety than to inclination, sacrificing 
external form to internal sentiment, eager to lend assist- 
ance and sympatliy, less truthful than patient, and so forth. 
A perfect soul is to be formed from the union of these 
two. Hardness of character in a woman is more easily 
corrected than want of honor in a man : a woman's want 
of lionor is as difficult to correct as a man's harshness. 
A boy utterly without honor and a girl without love 
deserve nothing else at the end of ten years than to be 
married to each other. The female sex, however, re- 
sembles the ocean, or water in general, which contains 
both greater and smaller beasts than the firm land. 

Since a theory of education is a moral science of food 
(dietetics), but not a science of healing, receipts against 
anger, selfishness, &c. find no place in my treatise, 
though they are, indeed, implied in \vhat has gone be- 
fore. And, truly, what a work of giant folios must be 
written to embrace a description of all the diseases, and 
all the remedies for the million shades of disease, which 
the combinations of different characters and years, va- 
rious degrees of activity, and external circumstances can 
produce ! 

The technical part of morality, such as order, clean- 
liness, politeness, has already found teachers in larger 
books than this. 

It is well that a treatise on education be occasionally 
written in pamphlet-form, and completed in three little 
volumes. Long talking begets short hearing, for people 
go away. An educational library — unless, indeed, a 
pocket library be invented — would soon cause men to 
attend to the first plan which offered itself, rather than be 
at the trouble of readinjr a whole host of books. 



APPENDIX OX MORAL EDUCATION. 327 

§ 123. 

But a few more paragraphs may be added without 
too much endangering the smalhiess of the book, or 
the 'facility of reading it. 

"VYouId you devote hours to moral instruction ? I would 
rather recommend years, and a never-ending course of 
that study. No lesson here avails but that founded on 
living facts, and even it is but as one incident in a fable. 
Advancing life is a perpetual preacher, home a domestic 
chaplain, and, instead of morning and evening prayers, 
life-long prayers must exert their influence. Sciences 
can be taught ; so in them you may give lessons ; genius 
can only be aroused ; provide it, then, with motives and 
opportunities. Can the heart of a corpse send forth 
living blood ? — The heart is the genius of virtue ; mo- 
rality its theory of aesthetics. If you wish anything to be 
forgotten, write it on the inner side of the study door ; if 
you want to desecrate the holy, hang a table of com- 
mandments perpetually before the eyes. Lavater said, 
" Every man has his Devil's moments." Consequently be 
not lost in surprise if the child also have his Satan's 
seconds as well as angel's minutes. Rather despair of 
grown men than of children. For these confuse you so 
much by the beautiful revelation of all their feelings and 
desires, and by their unpremeditated echo of all sounds, 
that the key-note remains unknown to you. With the 
former, on the contrary, one treble-discord presupposes an 
instrument thoroughly out of tune. And yet again : if a 
man be so unfathomable to a man, how much more so 
must his unequal, a child, be, which not merely conceals 
its fruit in its leaves, but those in their buds, and within 
them the flowers. Hence when new and necessary de- 
velopments take place, even though they be for the worse, 



328 LEVANA. 

do not blame previous innocent mistakes in the plan of 
education. For instance ; however much you endeavor 
to conceal and repress the long-dormant sexual instinct, 
it will yet iSnally start up armed where you least expect 
it, like Minerva from the head of Jupiter. 

I think that we parents, especially we modern parents, 
separate our children too anxiously from other children ; 
as gardeners do flowers to preserve the pollen unmixed. 
Can we very highly value any good or lovely thing which 
withers at the slightest touch ? If we have educated truly 
and implanted right principles in a child until his sixth 
year, a few bad examples will not so much drive away 
what is good as fan it into new life : if the water in the 
tea-urn be really boiling, a little spirit flame will keep it 
so all tea-time. Not the badness, but the long continuance, 
of examples injures children. And, again, the examples 
of strange children and indifferent people have less effect 
than those of the persons they most respect, — their 
parents and teachers; because the latter, like the exter- 
nal conscience of children, so break or darken their 
internal conscience, that the Devil finds it prepared 
for his residence. 

Yes, I go still further, and declare the preponderating 
influence of a good example over a bad one — or the vic- 
tory of the angel Michael over the Devil — to be so great, 
that I believe the poor children of a thoroughly unmar- 
riage-like union, where one parent is the ally of the Devil, 
and the other of the angel, will be gathered hardly, and 
at great cost, but all the more certainly under the white 
flag. 

The younger the children are, the more rapidly may 
we pass before them from jest to earnest ; for they do so 
themselves. All their modes of going from one thing to 



APPENEIX ON MORAL EDUCATION. 329 

another are leaps. How quickly they forget and forgive ! 
Then do so to them, especially in cases of punishment, and 
always inflict short punishments, so that they may never 
be thought unfounded and unjust. God be thanked for 
the memory of children, which is less retentive of sorrows 
than of joys ! Else what a prickly chain, formed by the 
uninterrupted series of punishments, would surround these 
little beings ! But children are capable of being delighted 
twenty times even on the worst of days. It is as difficult 
to arouse them from their sweet, godlike slumber by do- 
mestic or European wars as to awaken flowers out of 
their sleep by noise and motion. God grant the dear little 
ones may awake, like the flowers, to feel the sunshine and 
behold the day ! 

There are confused, obstinate hours, in which the child 
positively cannot pronounce certain words, nor obey cer- 
tain commands ; but he will do so the next hour. Do not 
consider this as stubbornness. I know men who have 
labored for years to get rid of some expression of the 
face, mode of writing, or odd word, to which they have 
become habituated, without any particular result. Apply 
this to children, who are often commanded to abandon 
some thousand habits at once, and do not exclaim so bit- 
terly against their disobedience, which is crf'ten nothing but 
the impossibility of an overburdened attention. 

The fruits of the right education of the first three years 
(a higher triennium than the academic) cannot be reaped 
during the sowing; — and you will often be unable to 
understand why, after doing so much, so much still re- 
mains to be done ; — but in a few years the growing har- 
vest will surprise and reward you ; for the numerous 
earthy crusts which covered the flower-shoots, but did not 
crush them, have at last burst before them. 



330 LEVANA. 

§ 124. 

Physical nature makes many little steps before taking 
a leap, and then begins the same process over again : the 
law of continuity is animated by the law of advancing and 
retreating efforts. The truth of this assertion is shown in 
almost every instance of physical development. 

But the mind must always be the companion of the 
body ; it is the strophe, the other the antistrophe, though 
occasionally their positions are reversed. The heavy 
clouds of the body must break in thunder-showers ; the 
growth of the physical powers must produce growth in 
the mental powers also ; and they, again, necessitate the 
former. But then the teacher stands petrified, to behold 
a new inimical — really friendly — division in the child's 
nature, and believes the former world to have vanished, 
because a new world has sprung into existence. Accus- 
tomed to the old, he would rather see the child's growth a 
mere growing old ; in short, he would wish it to be always 
the same, or, at most, to exhibit no greater change than 
that from the print to the colored painting : — the child 
must not drop his first seed-leaves in the beams of the 
sharp-cutting world, but yet must push forth new growing 
leaves. But since this can never be ; since every appli- 
cation of the flute to the lips produces a new incorporeal 
sound, the teacher ought to be of good courage, and only 
say, " The parts developed last must grow upon the first, 
and why need I fear for these, if there is nothing I would 
wish to recall in the others ? " 

§ 125. 

Parents possess a very easy and excellent means of 
preaching, and at the same time interesting and improv- 
ing their children, by relating to them how they passed 



APPENDIX ON MORAL EDUCATION. 331 

their own childhood with their parents. Independent of 
all other considerations, whatever is little is, on that very 
account, most pleasing to a child, himself a little thing ; 
the author's children have sometimes begged him for a 
little sea, nay, even for a little God. Now if the father 
or mother will descend from their lofty height, and speak 
of themselves, the parents, as having once been children, 
the little people can scarcely comprehend it, and look, 
with the anxious desire of learning, into the diminishing 
glass in which their present giant-parents move about as 
little children. There they see grandparents now com- 
mand little parents, and the very people obey whom now 
the child has to obey. In this relation he will only dis- 
cover the continuation of a previously acquired right, not 
of a mere accident ; — here he finds that his father com- 
mands now what formerly, when a child, he obeyed ; that 
he dearly loved, and was dearly loved by his parents, in 
whose breast the little grandchild now nestles all the more 
closely and warmly from the recollection of former love. 
Since the history of his parents' childhood must have so 
fresh and unceasing interest for the child, how great a 
weight and charm may there not be given by means of 
this interest to every word, every instruction, and, in 
short, to everything embraced in that relation ? If it 
chance that parents, thus describing their own life, were 
brought up as children in other circumstances, in other 
dwelling-places, the seed-field of instruction is vastly ex- 
tended. In short, parents in relating the incidents of their 
own childhood simply and truly may lay seeds, which in 
the warm soil of their children's childhood will grow and 
bear fruit. Even the little faults of their parents, and the 
consequent punishments of the grandparents, will not in 
relation lessen the children's reverence for their parents, 



332 LEVANA. 

unless Its foundation be grievously hollow, and the super- 
structure most poorly built. 

"We have here approached so very near the question, 
What are the best kind of stories for children ? that we 
may as well reply to it forthwith. Oriental and romantic 
tales seem the most suitable ; such as many of the Arabian 
Nights' Entertainment, Herder's Palm-Leaves, and Krum- 
macher's Parables. Children are little Orientals. Dazzle 
them with the wide plains of the East, with brilliant dew- 
drops, and bright-tinted flowers. Give them, at least in 
stories, the impulse which shall carry them over our cold 
northern rocks and North Capes, into the warm gardens 
of the south. Let your first miracle be, like Christ's, a 
turning of water into wine, of fact into poetry. Therefore 
do not shut up everything you permit to approach your 
child in a pulpit, with a sermon before it, nor suffer that 
morbid seeking after " the moral," which deforms most 
printed children's tales, and by which, precisely when 
they are on the way to the highest, they lose the path ; 
just as Charles XIL of Sweden generally lost at chess, 
because he moved out his king. Every good tale, like 
every good poem, is necessarily surrounded with instruc- 
tion. But the important thing is, — to paint a romantic 
morning-glow on the earth-kissing sky which, as age ad- 
vances, may deepen into a pure evening-red. Tell of ter- 
rible wild beasts, but let them be always at last overcome 
— (still let children be the most frequent actors on your 
stage) — also of long caverns, which lead to heavenly 
gardens, — of being happy, and of making happy, — of 
great dangers, and still more wonderful deliverances, — 
and even the strange adventures of mischievous children ; 
but always remember in your tales that tears are sooner 
drawn from children than smiles. For instance, the 



APPENDIX ON MORAL EDUCATION. 333 

author has frequently carried this so far as to represent 
the infant Christ* (he never even mentioned a Rupert*) 
seated on the moon, surrounded with none but good chil- 
dren ; and the evening glow in the December sky he 
could only account for by supposing it the reflection of 
the carriages full of Christmas gifts. In after years, 
when the children gaze upon the moon, and the redness 
of the evening sky, a wonderful delight "will gently fill 
their souls, and they will not know what strange ethereal 
air they breathe : the morning breeze of your childhood 
fans you, my children ! 

These fictions, w^hen translated into reahty, lead to no 
accusations of parental untruthfulness, as our own exam- 
ples,t and those of our forefathers, else grounded fast in 
truth, abundantly prove. 

And after all this, shall not the freedom which makes 
children citizens of the divine city of romance, not open 
for them the theatre : I do not mean that where comedies 
and tragedies are played, which only stun, excite, or de- 
ceive them, nor yet the little stage where they are them- 
selves the actors, — but the opera-house ? Does not the 
opera reveal romantic fairy-land to their eyes, and jetj 
by the impossibility of understanding the singing, which 
tlirows a wholesome darkness over the intrigue, preserve 
their ears from every moral taint ? And does not what is 
glaringly low in close connection with what is noble (as, 
for instance, in the Zauberflote), like the union of a mon- 

* Vide previous notes. 

t The rosy pictures yet bloom in the author's heart, which his 
father once painted there, on coming out of the study into the De- 
cember twilight, with the insignificant words, he had seen the infant 
Christ with golden beams pass through the dark night clouds. Who 
now could replace for him this rosy blessed beam, this heavenly treas- 
ure still shining in the clouds V 



334 LEVANA. 

key and a nun, strengtlien the love for excellence, and the 
detestation of depravity ? It seems to me that the opera, 
this acting, living fairy-tale, which the music makes metri- 
cal, and the brilliant scenery romantic, might change the 
heavy plough-like motion and creaking of the present into 
smooth flying, and is all the more necessary, because prose 
may be taught, but not poetry, and wings can more easily 
find feet than feet wings. At the same time, these sug 
gestions are offered rather interrogatively than affirma- 
tively ; since you may venture everything, and replace 
everything more easily than a child's innocence. 

§ 126. 

I would wish to say a few words about long journeys 
for children. Short ones of a few weeks are with justice 
considered to be physically and mentally improving trans- 
plantations of these young trees ; because the exchange 
of their old dull corner for the wide, airy landscape full 
of different people and new customs must necessarily en- 
liven and improve them. But something very different 
are children's travels with town-dwellers and land-scourers, 
who make the grand tour of half Europe, — (an expedition 
through his native town is one to a child,) — during which 
the daily transplanted tree is merely exhausted. If even 
grown-up people bring back from their journeys round the 
world full heads and empty hearts ; because daily walks 
through streets full of men only presenting the gauntlet, 
or, at all events, never offering a brother's kiss, must at 
last make the heart as cold as life at court does, where, 
as in a country-dance, the dancer goes down the middle, 
and up again, giving his hand indifferently to all ; how 
much must early long journeys — bringing only the ripe- 
ness of autumn to matured men — destroy a child by pro" 



APPENDIX ON MORAL EDUCATION. 335 

ducing such ripeness in spring. Living long in close con^ 
nection with the same people cherishes in children the 
warmth of the affections. The uniform sameness of 
people, dwellings, play-grounds, and even domestic fur- 
niture, hangs lovingly on a child, and strengthens that 
magnetic attraction, as a weight does suspended from a 
magnet : and thus in the spring-time of life is prepared 
the rich magnetic burst of the future affections, because 
the child naturally learns to love what he daily sees, — 
an easy matter in a village, — the hewer of wood for the 
family, the woman carrier, old Peter, who comes every 
Saturday to beg for Sunday ; yes, even the more distin- 
guished persons of his acquaintance who live far away. 
With a childhood full of affection we may endure half a 
life in the cold world. If, now, instead of such environ- 
ments, a child be taken on long journeys, — say half over 
Europe, — and must, since it is impossible to pack up 
market-places with their inhabitants in the carriage, or to 
crowd them into the hotels of large cities, every day fall 
upon new people, new rooms, new servants, new guests, 
towards whom it is impossible, from mere lack of time, 
for the young heart to experience any burst of sympathy : 
— what, then, can grow out of this little creature ? A 
courtier without a court, cool, polite, elegant, languid, 
ennuye, sweet and pretty. 

§ 127. 

Since in appendices, as in prefaces, things may be 
repeated which are contained in the book, I say, again, 
let there be rules for children ; it is immaterial what, but 
only as the centre of innumerable rays ! Law is unity, 
unity is deity. The Devil only is changeable. Unity of 
rule at once strengthens and controls both the too deli« 



336 LEVANA. 

catelj sensitive girl and the rough, active boy ; for the 
very same reason that we patiently endure the discomfort 
of frost, and the unbroken desolateness of the earth in 
winter, whereas a few snow-flakes in spring make us 
angry and gloomy : only because in winter the white 
enamel of snow is the rule, but in spring the various 
tinted flowers. No command seems harsher than the 
new one ; no necessity, than that which is freshly im- 
posed. If you would picture to yourself the most 
unhappy and most unfortunately circumstanced child, 
think of one who has been brought up by chance merely, 
without rule, irritated and appeased without reason, — 
destitute of confidence in the future, — finding in every 
minute a driving storm, — wishing nothing else than the 
fulfilment of his momentary desires, — a ball thrown 
sportively from love to hate, — with sorrows that bring 
no strength, and joys which produce no love. Happily 
I see no such being near me ! Have not even unjust 
rules a beneficial tendency in producing obedience to 
rule? When punishments were attached to the unin- 
tentional dropping of the hat, or even falling in riding 
through the streets of a town, both happened much more 
rarely : and in brotherhoods or sisterhoods where every 
snorer is awakened, no one snores : and where punish- 
ment is threatened even for the accidental breaking of 
china, less is broken. But the threatening must be a 
year older than the fault or the punishment, else the 
rule fails. 

§ 128. 

Give reasons for your requests more readily, and even 
at an earlier period, than reasons for your assertions : in 
the first place, it is easier to teach obedience than under- 



APPENDIX ON MORAL EDUCATION. 337 

standing ; in the second, a child's trust must never be 
weakened by reasons which only lead to doubt ; in the 
third, action requires external quickness, belief demands 
time ; and, in the fourth, the former is usually more 
opposed to previous wishes than the latter (for children 
are seldom orthodox) : at the same time that you smooth 
the way for your commands, as the French kings did, 
by gentle reasons, insist, like them, on obedience, if the 
reasons do not induce it. In a second edition of these 
rules, even as to giving reasons for commands, we find 
that the line must be drawn still tighter. Mothers, 
partly from kindness, partly from an inherent love of 
the healthy movement of the tongue, give as many rea- 
sons for their orders as may overcome the opposing 
arguments of the child ; and, if at last they should be 
unable to produce more, finish by asserting their author- 
ity. It were better to have begun with it. And cer- 
tainly, after compliance, the reasons will find readier 
admittance into the open, impartial ears. This is most 
markedly the case in the earliest years ; each advancing 
year requires an additional reason. The united care, 
both for a child's obedience and freedom, is one of the 
most difiicult requirements of education. The parental 
breath must only move the branch towards the fructifying 
pollen, but not bend or break the trunk. 

§ 129. 

Teachers generally desire an appendix to the chapter 
on moral education, containing a treatise on the preven- 
tion of sensual faults. Why do we find no such lamen- 
tations and remedies among the ancients or in the middle 
ages ? Must we suppose that the youth of those periods 
was better than the present ? Scarcely so. The reason 
15 r 



338 LEVANA. 

■v\'hy so much more is said and taught about such matter- 
now — always remembering, also, that books are now 
made, and a book-trade established, about every action — 
can only lie in this, that in the healthful past, as now 
among the vigorous commonalty, or unrestrained animals, 
many ill-regulated actions passed unpunished, because 
the fortifications of these unpolished times were not so 
easily demolished. But, at all events, the morbid, sickly 
imagination attendant on civilization is quite as much 
cause as effect ; to which must be added the temptations 
to these errors necessarily presented by large towns. 

Luther says, Contemptus frangit diaholum, ohservatw 
injiat ; which means, that to combat sin you must know 
it, and that is in itself a kind of defeat. A feeling of 
shame artificially taught before duly awakened by nature 
is a sewing together of the fig-leaves conducting to the 
fall, which in Eden they only covered. The modesty 
which naturally arises at a later period, is like the fig- 
tree itself, which only hides under its leaves the unripe 
fruit, which contains no poison. 

Many persons even say that a child should learn to be 
ashamed of seeing himself. Himself! Gracious heaven ! 
how much must the young mind have been poisoned 
before it would blush at the form it cannot change and 
did not choose ? before, in fact, it would blush at its 
Creator? To insure modesty I would advise the edu- 
cating of the sexes together ; for two boys will preserve 
twelve girls, or two girls twelve boys, innocent amidst 
winks, jokes, and improprieties, merely by that instinctive 
sense which is the forerunner of matured modesty. But 
T will guarantee nothing in a school where girls are alone 
together, and still less where boys are. Boys do harm 
to boys far more than girls to girls j for they are bolder, 



APPENDIX ON MORAL EDUCATION 339 

opener, rougher, more sociable, more curious about mat- 
ters, as girls are about persons. 

The glass screens which teachers put before the mental 
eyes of children are part of the mistaken instruction in 
modesty ; a kind of incomprehensible covering of a cov- 
er, the sheep's clothing of a sheep. He who admits that 
he has a secret to keep has, by doing so, revealed one 
half of it, and the other will speedily follow. Children's 
questions about where a little baby comes from, show 
nothing whatever more than a blameless desire of know- 
ing and asking about strange things. A child's questions 
about his mother's confinement have no more sinister 
meaning than his asking why the sun, which goes to bed 
in the west, rises in the east. But if those about him 
attach a foolish mystification to the event, instinct, which 
lies in the background, united with accidental expressions, 
which he will treasure up, will prematurely clear away 
the darkness. To this really injurious secrecy belong 
such expressions as, " This is only for grown-up people," 
or, " When you are older, you will know all about it," 
&c. Secret articles always give rise to war ; and secret 
alliance with sin is not very far from secret instructions 
of this kind. 

But how is the questioning child to be answered r 
"With as much truth as he wants : " As the little grub 
grows inside the nut, so the little infant grows within 
its mother, and is nourished by her flesh and blood ; 
hence she is ill," &c. Since children understand ten 
times less of what is said than we suppose, and, like 
grown-up people, ask a thousand times less about the 
final when they know the secondary cause, it will prob- 
ably be several years before the child again asks whence 
the little creature comes. Then give him this answer: 



540 LEVAKA. 

*' From the gront Go(i who ?cn»ls those little babies 
to married pooj^lo." AVe grown-np philosophers know 
nothing more about it ; and you say with perfeet truth 
to the ehild, *' A human being enn earve a statue, or 
embroider a flower, but he e^n make no living thing 
that grows." How easily a ehild's euriosity may be 
restrained, and yet satisfied, is very clearly shown in 
the fact, that during the last three centuries millions of 
Christians have died who have regularly every Sunday 
liejird that baptism took the place of the ancient Jewish 
rite of circumcision, and yet have never thought, far 
less asked, what circumcision is. Children learn and 
ask in the same way. The author received his first 
instruction in this article of Christian faith after eighteen 
years' study of Jewish works. 

One other remark may perhaps afford consolation to 
some parents : children at a certain age seem to have 
a particular inclination to do and to say improper things. 
This is sometimes very strangely manifested. I once 
hcArd some really pure-minded, good children beg tlieir 
father to repent some ugly words (referring to rudeness 
of speech more than anything else) which he had for- 
bidden them to use. beciiuse^ they said, they liked to 
hear such words. Be not afraid, if you educate your 
children carefully, of evil results. In the case of 
healthy children, especially, you need have no fear ; but 
physical indisposition too easily induces a morbid sickli- 
ness of the mind. 

In short, if there be any time when one person's aid 
is needed in the development of another, it is when the 
ripeJiing youth (or maiden) first discovers his new world 
of sex, when the fresh-blooming man bursts awny from 
the fading cliild. Happily K^ature herself has provided 



APPENDIX ON MORAL EDUCATION. 341 

a counterpoise to these seasonable spring-storms, by 
giving at the same time the hours of fairest dreams, of 
ideal excellence, and love for all that is greatest ai/d best. 
The watchful teacher, also, may add a balancing weight 
to the heart, namely, the head ; that is, let him reserve 
for that season some new science, some new object of 
engrossing interest, some new path in life. It is true 
this will not extinguish the volcano ; but the lava pour- 
ing into this sea will merely harden into a rock, and less 
evil will be done than was dreaded. For, out of all the 
yawning precipices of this age, does not a majority of 
healthy living voices arise, which have not been silenced, 
and which do not utter complaints ? It is but a very 
small number which is silent, without throat and without 
lungs, without either mind or body, — mere unburied 
corpses of hovering ghosts. — May Heaven present them 
with a grave ! 



SEVENTH FRAGMENT. 

Chap. I. More accurate Definition of the Desire for Intellectual Pro- 
gress, § 130. — Chap. II. Speech and Writing, §^ 131, 132. — Chap. 
III. Attention, and the Power of Adaptive Combination ; Pestalozzi ; 
Difference between Mathematics and Philosophy, §§ 133-135. — 
Chap. IV. Development of Wit, \\ 136- 138. — Chap. V. Devel- 
opment of Reflection, Abstraction, and Self-Knowledge; together 
with an extra Paragraph on the Powers of Action and Business, 
§§ 139, 140. — Chap. VI. On the Education of the Pvecollection, 
not of the Memory, §§ 141 - 144. 

CHAPTER I. 

ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DESIRE FOR INTELLECTUAL 
PROGRESS. 



§ 130. 




THER writers on education call the desire of 
intellectual progression the faculty of obtain- 
ing knowledge, — that is to say, thej call 
painting seeing, — or the intellectual powers, 
and think of the senses and the memory as also exerting 
an educational influence ; or they speak of the develop- 
ment of spontaneous activity, as if the will itself were not 
such a developing power. The majority (before Pesta- 
lozzi) only attempted to pour into the mind a vast amount 
of knowledge of every kind, and thought an intelligent 
man must be the necessary result. Learned fools, with 



INTELLECTUAL PROGRESS. 343 

mind neither for the present nor the future, who (like 
finite beings in another sense) are continuously created, 
but never able to create ; heirs of all ideas, but origina- 
tors of none, they are indeed samples of their education, 
but no proofs of its excellence. 

We will take the straight path which leads to the cen- 
tre, instead of wandering round and round the circle. 

The will reproduces itself only, and acts only within, 
not without, itself; for the external action is as little the 
new act of the particular volition, as are the words signi- 
fying it of the particular thought. The desire of mental 
progress, on the contrary, enlarges its world for the recep- 
tion of new creatures, and is as dependent on objects as 
the pure will is independent of them. The will could 
reach its ideal, but finds a strange opposition to it, — 
Kant's radical evil, — whereas no power stands opposed 
to thought, — as sin does to virtue, — but only the differ- 
ence between its steps, and the impossibility of seeing 
whither they reach. To know nothing is not so bad as 
to do nothing ; and error is less the opponent than the 
accompaniment of truth ; for to miscalculate means 
merely to obtain something different from what it should 
be, but still to calculate ; whereas immorality stands di- 
rectly opposed to morality. 

The mental desire of advancement which, in a higher 
sense than the physical, works by means of, and in ac- 
cordance with, the will, that is to say, creates new ideas 
out of old ideas, is the distinguishing characteristic of 
man. No will restrains the order of a beast's actions. 
In our waking moments we are actually conscious that 
we think ; in our dreams we receive, if I may so express 
it, that consciousness. In the man of genius the forma- 
tion of ideas appears actually creative ; in ordinary men, 



344 LEVANA. 

merely recollective and necessary : the precise shades of 
difference are, however, difficult to define. The develop- 
ments of this formative power are, first, language ; and, 
secondly, observation; both of which, by defining and 
marking an idea, bring it more accurately before the 
mind ; thirdly, imagination, which is capable of retaining 
a whole series of ideas, so as to obtain from it the un- 
known, but sought for, and, consequently, anticipated 
greatness, either as part, consequence, foundation, symbol, 
or image; fourthly, wit; fifthly, reflection; sixthly, re- 
membrance. 

From this almost genealogical gradation it is readily 
perceived that all instruction naturally falls into two dis- 
tinct classes, one of which — mathematics, for example 
— provides organic material for the intellectual energies ; 
the other, — such as natural history, — only inanimate 
objects. For all cumulative preliminary instruction, be 
it in natural history, geography, history, antiquities, only 
provides the intellect with materials, not with incitements 
to labor and power. The old division into knowledge of 
words and knowledge of things is certainly correct ; but 
the inventory of what belongs to one class, and what to 
the other, is about as erroneous as that of diseases before 
the time of Brown, which, as by him, were divided into 
sthenic and asthenic, diarrhoea and plague being placed in 
the former, and the truly sthenic complaints of coughs, 
catarrhs, &c., in the latter class. Language, for instance, 
was ranked as a knowledge of words ; the history of na- 
ture and of nations, as a knowledge of things : it ought 
to be reversed. 

One word in this place on the abuse, or too great use, 
of natural history. This seems to be the wishing-cap of 
those teachers who have little of that on which the hat is 



SPEECH. 



345 



usually placed ; or tne purveyor of those who are defi- 
cient in scientific knowledge. The author was gratified 
by finding, in Goethe's Elective Affinities, accordance 
"with a thought which he had noted down in his children's 
diary in January, 1808 ; namely, what advantage can 
children obtain from the description of an unknown for- 
eign animal which would not equally result from that of 
any casual monster? At most this unverified account 
can but serve as honey on wholesome bread, or as the 
bill of sale of some animal to be seen ; and is altogether 
a mere home-reading by the light of the embers. But, 
on the contrary, the most minute family history, with 
representations the size of life, should be given about all 
domestic and native animals. Yea, how very much 
would botany and mineralogy, not only as exercising the 
ob.^ervation, but also as enriching the present, exceed the 
small advantages of foreign zoology ! Just in the same 
way might the modern expensively painted worlds {orhis 
pictus) be advantageously replaced by workshops, in 
which one artificer after another could actually show and 
explain his trade to his children guests. 



CHAPTER II. 

SPEECH AND WRITING. 



§131. 

TO learn to speak is something higher than to learn to 
speak languages ; and all the advantages which are 
ascribed to the ancient lar-.gp.nge-, as educational medij^ 
15* 



34^ LEVANA. 

applj with double force to the mother-tongue. Every 
new language is only understood by connecting and bal- 
ancing it with the first : the original primary sign merely 
acquires another sign ; and so the new language is not 
formed on the one last learned, nor is one dependent on 
another, but all on the first native tongue. 

Name to the child every object, every sensation, every 
action, in case of exigency, even by a foreign word (for 
to the child, as yet, there is none) ; and always, where 
it is possible, arouse his attention, and give accuracy to 
his perceptions, by naming all the individual parts of 
whatever you may have in hand. A child has invari- 
ably so great a love of hearing, that he will constantly 
ask questions about matters which he knows, merely in 
order to hear you speak, or will even tell you some little 
story, so as to have the pleasure of hearing you after- 
wards relate it to him. By the fact of naming, external 
objects, like islands, are taken possession of, and animals 
are tamed by accustoming them to answer to a name. 
Without a defining word, — the mental index-finger, — 
unlimited nature stands before a child like a column of 
quicksilver without a barometric scale (to the beast it is 
even without the ball of quicksilver), and by it no move- 
ment can be observed. Speech is the finest line-drawer 
of infinity, the dividing water of chaos : the importance of 
its minute subdivisions is shown in savages, with whom 
frequently a single word signifies a whole sentence. A 
village child is inferior to a town child merely by his 
poverty of speech. To the dumb beast the whole world 
gives but one impression, and so from want of two he 
does not even count one. 

Let every material substance be both mentally and 
physically divided and analyzed before the child, during 



SPEECH. 347 

the first ten years of his life ; but suffer nothing spiritual 
to undergo the same process, for this, which exists only 
once, and that within the child, soon dies, without the 
chance of resurrection, under the severing-knife ; bodies, 
on the contrary, return new-born every day. 

The mother tongue affords the most innocent philoso- 
phy and exercise of reflection for children. Speak very 
much and very clearly ; and oblige them to be definite in 
the affairs of every-day life. Why do you leave mental 
development by means of language to a foreign tongue ? 

Occasionally attempt longer sentences than the short 
childish ones of many teachers, or the hackneyed ones of 
most French writers : an unintelligibleness which brings 
its own solution by mere unaltered repetition exercises 
and strengthens the mind. Sometimes exercise even 
little children with riddles of contradictory words : such 
as, I heard this with my eyes ; this is very prettily ugly. 

Do not fear the unintelligibleness even of whole sen- 
tences ; your mien, your accent, and the ardent desire of 
understanding, explain one half, and, with the assistance 
of time, the other, AYith children, as with the Chinese 
and men of the world, accent is half the language. Re- 
member that they learn to understand your language 
much sooner than to speak it, just as we do Greek or any 
foreign tongue. Trust to the deciphering aid of time, 
and of the context. A child of five years old understands 
the. words "but, indeed, now, on the contrary, certainly" ; 
but, if you desire an explanation of them, ask the father, 
not the child. The word indeed alone would puzzle a ht- 
tle philosopher. If the child of eight years old finds his 
improved language understood by a child of three, why 
should you contract yours to his vocabulary? Always 
employ a language some years in advance of the child 



348 LEVAXA. 

(men of genius in their books speak to us from the van- 
tage-groimd of centuries) : speak to the one-year-old 
child as though he were two, and to him as though he 
were six ; for the difference of progress diminishes in the 
inverse proportion of years. Let the teacher, especially 
he who is too much in the habit of attributing all learning 
to teaching, consider that the child already carries half 
his world, that of mind, — the objects, for instance, of 
moral and metaphysical contemplation, — ready formed 
within him ; and hence that language, being provided 
only with physical images, cannot give, but merely illu- 
mine, his mental conceptions. 

Cheerfulness, like distinctness in conversation with chil- 
dren, should be imparted to us by their cheerfulness and 
distinctness. We may learn to speak from them, as well 
as teach them by speaking ; for instance, such bold and 
yet correctly formed words as I have heard from three 
and four year old children: "the beer-casker, the stringer, 
the bottler," instead of the maker of casks, strings, and 
bottles, — " the flying mouse," certainly much better than 
our word bat, — " the music plays," — "I am the see-er- 
through," when standing behind a telescope, — " Ah ! 
look ! one (on the clock) is already come," &c. 

In later years it becomes part of instruction in lan- 
guage to show the living foundation of the colorless 
images of every-day speech. A young man uses the 
expressions, " all made on the same last," or " fishing in 
troubled waters " ; and when he finds that the shoemaker 
really uses such a last, and that fishing in troubled water 
is practised, he is astonished to discover that a real fact is 
the foundation of the transparent image. 

Pestalozzi commences the division of the universe into 
parts by that of the body into limbs ; because it is in 



SPEECH. 



349 



clo.-est and most important connection with the child, and 
is everywhere composed of similar parts, which is not the 
case with plants or utensils. A still more important ad- 
vantage is, that there are always two examples of it in 
the study ; and that the child, between / and thou, be- 
tween the larger visible limbs of his teacher, and his own 
smaller ones, sensible only to tlie touch, can always pass 
from one object to another and compare them together. 
At the same time, Pestalozzi will not only divide and 
illumine the waste ether with clearly marked names, as 
with stars ; but, while he teaches the child to collect the 
subdivisions under their division, the lesser under the 
greater whole, he develops the capacity of retaining 
whole series, or the power of adaptive combination, — 
of which hereafter. 

Fichte, in his Discourses io the German nation, attaches 
too little value to the naming, and, as it were, A B C, of 
external objects and observations, requiring them merely 
for what is internal, for sensations ; because he thinks 
that the naming of the former class only serves the child 
fon communication, not for the better understanding of it. 
But it seems to me that, as the speechless animal floats 
about in the external world as in a dark, bewildering 
ocean, so man would be equally lost in the starry firma- 
ment of external perceptions, did he not, by means of 
language, divide the confused stars into constellations, 
and thus reveal the whole in parts to the comprehension. 
Language alone illumines the vast monotonously colored 
chart of the universe. 

Our forefathers, from pedantic and ecoromic reasons, 
but with advantageous results, as a mental gymnastic and 
excitement, ranked a foreign language, such as Latin, 
among the great powers of education. Certainly the die* 



350 LEVANA. 

tionary of foreign words develops little, except by teach- 
ing the fine shades of difference among our own : but the 
grammar, as the logic of the tongue, — the first philoso- 
phy of reflection, — does much; for it carries the signs of 
things back to the things themselves, and compels the 
mind, turned upon itself, to observe the method of its 
observations, that is, to reflect, or at least to take firmer 
possession of the sign, and not to confuse it, as a mere 
expression, with the sensation itself. During immaturity 
this kind of knowledge is better obtained through the 
grammar of a foreign language than through that of our 
own, which is more indissolubly blended with the sensa- 
tion ; hence logically-cultivated people first learned to 
construct their own language by a foreign one, and 
Cicero went to a Greek, sooner than to a Latin school ; 
and hence, in those centuries when the Greek and Latin 
languages formed the whole subject of learning, the intel- 
lect became more formal, and unsubstantial logic filled 
the mind, as the whole scholastic philosophy proves. 
When Huart asserts that a good head learns grammar 
with the most difficulty, he can only mean, unless he con- 
fuses dictionary with grammar, a head formed for busi- 
ness or art rather than for thought. Every good gram- 
marian, the Hebrew Tacitus Danz, for instance, is partly 
a philosopher, and he must be a philosopher who writes 
the best grammar. The grammatic analysis of the old 
schools only differs in its object from Pestalozzi's visible 
series. Consequently a foreign language, particularly the 
Latin, is among the healthiest early exercises of the power 
of thinking. 

§ 132. 

Since writing signifies but the sign of things, and Dnngs 
us through it to the things themselves, it is a stricter iso« 



WRITING. 351 

lator and clearer collector of the ideas than even speech 
itself. Sound teaches quickly and generally ; vriting^ 
uninterruptedly and with more accuracy. Writing, from 
that which the writing-master teaches to that which ap- 
proaches the province of the author, gives clearness to the 
ideas. We will not here lay too great stress on the fact 
that the letters which Sevigne wrote are much more ele- 
gant than those she dictated ; or that Montesquieu, who 
could not himself write, frequently passed three hours 
before anything worthy of preservation occurred to him, 
whence many deduce the curt style of his writings ; but 
it is certain that our representation is much more a mental 
seeing than hearing, and that our metaphors play far more 
on an instrument of color than of sound, and therefore 
writing which lingers under the eyes must assist the for- 
mation of ideas to a much greater extent than the rapid 
flight of sound. The scholar, indeed, carries it so far that, 
when he reflects, he really seems to read a printed page ; 
and when he speaks, to give a little declamation out of a 
quickly and well-written pamphlet. 

Let boys write out their own thoughts sooner than copy 
yours, so that they may learn to exchange the heavy- 
ringing coin of sound into more convenient paper money. 
And let them be spared the writing-texts of schoolmasters, 
containing the praises of industry, of writing, of their mas- 
ter, or of some old prince ; in short, subjects about which 
the teacher can produce nothing better than his pupils. 
Every representation without some actual object or motive 
is poison. Since some real occurrence always suggested 
to men of genius, such as Lessing, Rousseau, and others, 
the subject of their fictions, thus occasional, in the highest 
sense of that word ; how can you require a boy to dip his 
pencil in the airy blue of indefiniteness, and therewith so 



352 LEVANA. 

paint the vault of heaven that the invisible tint shall pro* 
duce the color of Prussian blue ? I cannot understand 
schoolmasters ! Must the man, even in childhood, preach 
from the appointed Sunday text, and never choose one for 
himself in Nature's Bible? Something similar may be said 
about the writing of open letters (an unsealed one is almost 
inevitably half untrue) which the teachers of girls' schools 
require, in order, say they, to exercise their pupils in epis- 
tolary style. A nothing writes to a nothing : the whole 
affair, undertaken by the desire of the teacher, not of the 
heart, is a certificate of the death of thoughts, an announce- 
ment of the burning of the materials. Happy is it if the 
commanded volubility of the child, arising from coldness 
and addressed to emptiness, do not accustom her to insin- 
cerity. If letters must be forthcoming, let them be written 
to some fixed person, about some definite thing. But what 
need of " so much ado about nothing," since — not even 
excepting political or literary newspapers — nothing can 
be written so easily as letters on any subject when there 
is a motive for them, and the mind is fully informed of 
the matter ? 

The writing of one page excites the desire of learning 
more strongly than the reading of a whole book. Many 
readers of select school libraries are scarcely able to write 
a clear and good account of a fatal accident, and a request 
for charitable assistance, for a weekly newspaper. And it 
is equally true that many writers are just as indifferent 
speakers : they resemble many great merchants in Am- 
sterdam, who have no warehouse, but only a writing-room ; 
give them time, however, and they will procure the goods 
by writing. Corneille spoke badly, but he made his heroes 
declaim excellently. Regard every pupil for examination 
as a stammering dumb Corneille, and provide him a room, 



ATTENTION. 353 

time, and a pen ; he will speak by these, and so pass a 
very good examination. I close this chapter as a certain 
Indian begins his book, — Blessed be the man who in- 
vented writing ! 



CHAPTER III. 

ATTENTION, AND THE POWER OF ADAPTIVE COMBINATION. 
§ 133. 

BONNET calls attention the mother of genius, but 
she is in fact her daughter ; for whence does she 
derive her origin, save from the marriage contracted in 
heaven between the object and the desire for it ? Hence 
attention can really be as little preached or flogged into a 
person as ability. Swift in a musical academy, Mozart 
in a philosophical lecture-room, Raffaelle in a political 
club, Frederick the Great in a cmir d amour, — could you 
give an attentive ear to these different men, all of whom 
possess genius, are of mature years, and have thoughts 
about the important matters of art, science, love, and poli- 
tics ? And do you expect and desire it in children, in per- 
sons of unripe age and inferior capacity for much more tri- 
fling objects? But, in fact, you desire that your individual 
attention, which exhibits as much caprice with regard to 
its objects as that of a man of genius, should be acquired 
by the child, and that your narrowness of view should be 
shared by him. 

If you attach reward or punishment to the child's atten- 
tion to any object, you have put another, that of selt-in^er- 



354 LEVANA. 

est, in its place, rather than strengthened the mental power 
or excited the desire of improvement ; at most, you have 
but labored for tlie memory. No sensuous pleasure lines 
the path into the empire of mind ; hence studying for a 
livelihood resembles the stone by whose aid the diver 
sinks more rapidly to seek pearls for his master, and 
which the aeronaut takes with him for the very differ- 
ent purpose of rising higher towards heaven when he 
casts it overboard. 

But what is to be done ? So teachers always ask, in- 
stead of first asking, What is to be avoided ? The laws 
of their order forbid the Jesuits to study longer than two 
hours ; but your school laws command little children to 
study, that is, to be attentive, as long as older people can 
teach : it is quite too much ; especially when one con- 
siders the child's senses open to every influence, the 
cheerful sounds of the busy market-place, the blossoming 
boughs waving round the school-room windows, the nar- 
row strip of sunshine on the dull school-room floor, and 
the delicious certainty on Saturday that there will be no 
lessons in the afternoon. 

There have been many cases in which the author of 
Levana himself has resolved to lend an attentive ear to 
some story, not more than a quarter of an hour long, so 
as to be able to relate it afterwards : he did inwardly 
w^hat he could, and labored to maintain the closest atten- 
tion ; but this very labor gave rise to incidental thoughts ; 
he was compelled to request a repetition in order to catch 
the thread of the story ; and then, at last, after all this 
resolute anxiety, determination, and design, he had ob- 
tained nothing more than a table of contents of the story, 
which he could enlarge upon in the proper place. Do 
you think it easier for a child to command his attention, 



ATTENTION. 355 

and repress weariness, than for a grown-up man who 
addresses him ? It is possible for a child to take the 
greatest interest in your instruction, but not just to-daj, 
nor at this particular window ; or, perhaps, because he 
has seen or tasted some novelty ; or, perhaps, because his 
father has announced either a country ramble or a con- 
finement ; or, because his former inattention has met its 
punishment, and the child now thinks far more of the 
punishment than of the means of avoiding it. Human 
beings, in fact, are incapable of uninterrupted attention 
(eternal longing may be much more truly promised than 
eternal loving), and the child's attention is not always 
identical with that of his parents. 

If novelty be confessedly the keenest sharpener of the 
inner ear, the forcing-house of every plant, why do teach- 
ers, after constant repetitions, require the first eagerness 
of attention from the young souls everywhere surrounded 
by new worlds ? Do you suppose their pillow is a 
gilded cushion on which the glass is rubbed to obtain 
electricity ? 

If it be difficult to place ourselves in the position of 
persons similarly circumstanced, how much more difficult 
must it be to do so with regard to persons unlike our- 
selves ! How many instances are there of teachers hav- 
ing warmed themselves for years by the school-room 
stove, without remarking or remembering anything about 
the raised figures by which the manufacturer endeavored 
to display his taste and skill. Let every reader after the 
perusal of these lines examine his apartment, and observe 
whether he does not become conscious of twenty new 
objects, among which he has constantly lived without 
hitherto being aware of their presence ! Were we in- 
clined to enter into more minute particulars, it would, 



356 LEVANA. 

among other examples, be easy to show the different 
effects of mere writing-copies on a child's attention. If 
he have the same words to copy throughout the whole 
page, each line will be worse written than its predeces- 
sor ; but if the copy change frequently, he will have a 
new source of interest and attention from line to line ; 
still, even in this case, novelty will exert its power over 
the attention, and the first word, like the first line, will be 
the best written. Repetition, else the mainspring of 
instruction, is the chief destroyer of attention ; because, 
in order to give attention to what is repeated, you must 
first have found it worthy of a still greater exertion of 
that faculty. 

A very important distinction must be drawn between 
the power of attention diffused among the generality of 
men, and that appertaining solely to men of genius. 

The latter can only be recognized, protected, and cher- 
ished, but not created. Pay attention, teachers! to 
the attention manifested by your children, so that you 
may not, to the injury of his whole future life, demand 
from the genius who astonishes you with his power and 
his brilliancy the very opposite qualities to those he 
possesses : do not expect a painter's eye in a Haydn, nor 
a poem from an Aristoteles. Pay attention to this, and 
you will not offer to immortal love an ape instead of a 
Psyche. 

This instinct-hke attention, waiting till its proper object 
is manifested, explains some apparent anomalies, such as 
that the deep thinking Thomas Aquinas in his youth was 
called a cow, and that the mathematician, Schmidt, from 
incapacity for study, or business, continued a mere la- 
borer for thirty-eight years. Good trees at first produce 
only wood, not fruit. Pure silver when broken seems 



ATTENTION. 357 

black. Afterwards, the work advances all the easier and 
the quicker ; and while information and talent have to 
raise their gifts laboriously, like gold out of deep mines, 
genius presents his like jewels gathered out of loose sand. 
On the other hand, common every-day attention needs 
not so much to be aroused, as to be distributed and con- 
densed ; even careless, inattentive children possess the 
faculty, but it is dissipated upon all passing objects. The 
child in his new world resembles a German in Rome, a 
pilgrim in the Holy Land. Attention to everything is 
impossible : the whole of no ball can be seen. You ele- 
vate the passive being, before whom the world moves 
unnoticed, into an active one, by placing some one object 
in a prominent position : by displaying its wonders you 
excite his interest. Perpetually ask children Why ? The 
questions of the teacher find more open ears than his 
answers. You can elevate him, also, as Pestalozzi rec- 
ommends, by the magnifying-glass of separation ; and 
then again by restoring it as before. As God, according 
to the schoolmen, knows everything because he made it, 
teach the child his power of mental creation ; readiness 
of attention in recognizing things will then follow natu- 
rally. And this brings me to the succeeding paragraphs 
on the power of adaptive combination. 

§ 134. 

The old notion, that mathematics exercises and requires 
philosophical accuracy and depth of thought, and that 
mathematics and philosophy are sisters, has, I hope, dis- 
appeared. With the exception of the all-powerful Leib- 
nitz, great mathematicians, such as Euler, D'Alembert, 
and even Newton, have been poor philosophers. The 
French have obtained more and frreater mathematical 



358 LEVANA. 

than philosophical prizes : great masters of numbers and 
great mechanicians have been frequently found among 
the people, but equally great philosophers never ; and, 
on the other hand, powerful and profound philosophers, 
after the most arduous endeavors, have frequently still 
remained but indifferent mathematicians. Among chil- 
dren we find some open to philosophical instruction, some 
only to mathematical. This judgment of experience is 
explained and verified by Kant's Critique. The mathe- 
matician contemplates quantities, the philosopher reflects 
upon and abstracts from them. The certainty of the 
former is, like that of the external world, a present real- 
ity, brought about by no logical conclusion : it cannot 
prove anything, but merely show that it is so ; and if the 
quantities exceed the power of instantaneous apprehen- 
sion (as is generally the case even in the simplest arith- 
metic), they are proved in a merely mechanical manner 
by the method.* In philosophy there is no such con- 
viction by the truth of the method, but only by perceiving 
the truth of the idea. Malebranche said rightly, the 
geometrician does not love truth, but the discernment of 
it (1. i. ch. 2.), or, to express it more clearly, not its exist 
ence, but its proportions. Philosophy, on the contrary, 
will search into existence ; it places itself and the mathe- 
matician, — which is what he is incapable of doing, — the 
whole world within, around, and above, before its gaze. 
Hence religion and poetry, but not dead mathematics, 
spread living fibres far and deep into philosophy ; hence 
the great Kant admitted the possibility that the sciences 
of number and measurement, as exponents of earthly time 
and observation, might have no more truth beyond this 

* I at once perceive that 2X2 = 4; but confidence in the rule 
makes me beUeve that 319 X 5011 = 598509. 



ATTENTION. 359 

life, whereas he never supposed this to be possible with 
regard to the ideas of reason and morahty. 

§ 135. 

The former paragraph, with its distinction of mathe- 
matics from philosophy, is meant to introduce nothing but 
the praise of Pestalozzi's method of teaching, which leads 
the child's mind straight between the parallels of num- 
bers and lines. For in what other manner can you 
arouse the innate desire of mental progress ? The im- 
pulses of the senses excite and then stupefy, but help not 
to produce it. To overwhelm the mind with lessons, 
that is, with mere summaries of accounts, resembles the 
Siberian custom of giving the sacrament of the Lord's 
Supper to infants : to teach reflection and abstraction is, 
in fact, to tear the body to pieces, and lay open the 
springs of love and faith, in order to anatomize the child's 
heart and blood. Moreover, philosophy begins with what 
is highest and most difficult ; mathematics, with what is 
nearest and easiest. What, then, remains ? The meta- 
physics of the eye ; the knowledge forming the boundary 
between experience and abstraction ; that cool, tranquil 
calculation which does not yet inquire about the three 
giant rulers of knowledge, — God, the Universe, and our 
own Soul ; which rewards every momentary sowing with 
a harvest ; which neither excites nor represses desires 
and wishes, and yet finds on every spot of earth, as 
in a copy-book, examples and exercises ; which, unlike 
thought and poetry, needs fear no difference of result from 
diflferences in heart and mind ; and for which no child is 
too young, for it, hke him, grows up from the smallest 
beginning. 

Therefore Pestalozzi's gradual and luminous accumu* 



360 LEVAXA. 

lation of arithmetical and geometrical proportions is 
right ; it is teaching to carry an increasing weight, like 
Milo's calf,* which may at last serve for the thank-offer- 
ing of an Archimedes. What Pope Sixtus V. roughly 
said, " that, after all, asses might be taught arithmetic," 
and the well-known remark in the French Encyclopedia, 
that some imbecile persons have learnt to play chess 
•well, — for chess is a mathematical combination, and the 
chess-board may serve as a test of mathematical power, — 
all this commends the wisdom by which Pestalozzi wrote 
over life, as Plato over his study, " The geometrician 
alone may enter here." 

Consequently, the reproaches cast against the Swiss, 
" that his school is no school of the prophets, nor even of 
philosophers," are, in fact, eulogies ; and it were to be 
regretted if he could show the falsity of the reproaches. 
Our hazy and inconstant age, fuller of dreams than of 
poems, of phantasms than of imagination, has great need 
of the clear, accurate eye of mathematics, and of firm 
hold upon reality. 

And what, then, has it done towards the development 
of the mental faculties ? A great thing in childhood : it 
has unfolded the power of adaptive combination. Since 
the simple beam of mental activity has been already 
broken into the colors of many intellectual powers, it may 
be permitted me to name one more. I mean that power 
which is as different from imagination, w^iich only par- 
tially embraces a subject, as from fancy, which creates ; 
that power which assists the philosopher in his chains of 
reasoning, the mathematician in his calculations, and 
every inventor in his efforts, by retaining in connection, 

* The athlete Milo, by daily carrying a growing calf, became at last 
strong enough to carry the full-grown ox. 



ATTENTION. 361 

and presenting in order, the daily increasing masses of 
ideas, numbers, lines, and images. The pupil of Pes- 
talozzi exercises no creative power in his long numerical 
equations, {that belongs only to the discoverer of the 
method,) but he calls into play his faculties of examining 
and surveying. These are capable of unlimited growth : 
but what would Newton, the mathematical pole-star, have 
become in an ocean of books ? Probably as incompre- 
hensible to others, in their best years, as he was to him 
self in his old age ! If many measure the course of ideas 
by seconds ; — Bonnet required half a second for a clear 
idea, Chladen only three thirds to recall an old one, 
according to Halle r's Physiology ; — they seem only to 
reckon in that the mental perusal of previously impressed 
thoughts ; for is it possible to mark thought, to divide 
the soft breath of heaven into waves ? And is not the 
vastest idea — God, or the Universe — as truly an 
instantaneous flash of light, as the poorest idea, even 
nothing ? 

The strengthening of the power in question might 
afterwards be renewed with advantage to many sciences. 
In some cases, for instance, what great advantage would 
be gained from having thoroughly understood, and being 
able to recall, the various parts of a watch, — from such 
as were the playthings of our childhood to the accurate 
repeater of half-quarters, — the masterly echo of time. 
This power may be prepared for the most opposite efforts 
by means of two very different sciences ; by astronomy, 
for the comprehension of vast masses ; by anatomy, for 
that of the smallest portions of matter : the latter re- 
quires an unexpectedly great effort, for it is physically 
as difficult either for the finger or the eye to embrace 
the smallest as the largest object. 
16 



362 LEVANA. 

The power we are speaking of may also bj strength- 
ened by gradually compressing a long historical or phi* 
losophical paragraph into an epigram. For instance, 
suppose this to be the sentence : " Popular authors do 
not make a selection among their thoughts, but write 
them down as they arise, just as, in most states, the 
monarchs are not elected, but rule in order of birth." 
You might compress it thus : " Popular authors do not 
permit their ideas to rule according to the choice of 
reason, but according to the natural succession of birth.'* 
And you might conclude it proverbially thus : " In the 
popular brain the empire of ideas is hereditary, not 
elective." Of course, this only applies in the education 
of children ; for to educated readers such brevity would 
be wearisome. 



CHAPTER IV. 

DEVELOPMENT OF WIT. 

§ 136. 



" TTNTIL the human body is developed, every arti- 
\^ ficial development of the mind is injurious. 
Philosophical strainings of the understanding, poetical 
ones of the fancy, destroy those very faculties in the 
young mind, and others along with them. But the de- 
velopment of wit, which is scarcely ever thought of for 
children, is the least hurtful, because its efforts are easy 
and momentary ; the most useful, because it compels the 
new machinery of ideas to quicker motion ; because, by 
the pleasure of discovery, it gives increased power of 



WIT. 363 

command over those ideas ; and because, in early years, 
this quality, either in ourselves or others, particularly 
delights by its brilliancy. Why are there so few invent- 
ors, and so many learned men, whose heads contain 
nothing but immovable furniture, in which the ideas 
peculiar to each science lie separately as in monks' cells, 
so that when their possessor writes about one science, 
he remembers nothing that he knows about the rest? 
Why? Solely because children are taught more ideas 
than command over those ideas, and because in school 
they are expected to have their thoughts as immovably 
fixed as their persons. 

" Schlozer's historical style should be imitated in other 
sciences. I have accustomed my Gustavus to hear and 
to understand, and so, himself, to discover the resem- 
blances among dissimilar sciences. For instance, all 
great or heavy things move slowly ; hence Oriental 
monarchs, the Dalai-Lama, the sun, do not move at all. 
Winkelmann tells us that the wise Greeks walked slow^- 
ly ; also the hour-finger of a clock, the ocean and the 
clouds in fine weather, move slowly. Again, men, the 
earth, and pendulums go quicker in winter. Or, again, 
the name of Jehovah, of Eastern princes, and of Rome's 
guardian deity, as well as the Sibylline books, the most 
ancient Christian and the Catholic Bible, and the Veda, 
were concealed. It is indescribable what great readiness 
and pliability of thought children thus attain. Of course 
the information which you wish to combine must first be 
in the head. But enough ! the pedant understands and 
does not approve ; and the less prejudiced reader also 
says. Enough ! " 

This paragraph follows some introductory arguments 
in the Invisible Lodge, Book I. p. 260. 



364 LEVANA. 

§ 137. 
After the severe rule and lesson-time of mathematics, 
the sans-culottish freedom and play-time of wit best fol- 
lows ; and if the former, like the Neptunist, forms all 
things coldly and slowly, the latter, like the Vulcanist, 
ascribes to them a rapid and fiery origin. The glance of 
wit passes over long and dark series of ideas, acquired by 
the power of preliminary education, in order afterwards 
to create. The first efforts of intellectual growth are 
witty. And the passage from geometry to the electric 
art of wit, as Lichtenberg, Kastner, D'Alembert, and the 
French in general, prove, is a natural and an easy, rather 
than a forced march. The Spartans, Cato, Seneca, Taci- 
tus, Bacon, Young, Lessing, Lichtenberg, are examples 
how the full, heavy, thunder-clouds of knowledge break 
out in the lightning of wit. Every discovery is at first 
an incidence ; and from this moving point is developed a 
progressive living form. The intellectual effort doubles 
and trebles itself; one witty idea produces another, as the 
new-born Diana assisted at the birth of her twin brother 
Apollo. 

§138. 

It is easier to perceive that wit precedes reflection and 
imagination, in the nursery and the school-room, than to 
see how to produce it. The great majority of teachers 
will object that they do not themselves possess it, and that 
it is very difficult to imitate the French language-master 
who helped out his German pupils with their German, 
and yet knew nothing of it. Niemeyer recommends for 
this purpose charades and anagrams, — but these only 
serve for reflection upon language ; — and riddles:. — 
which, though better, are yet but witty definitions ; — and 
games in company, the majority of which, however, tcna 



WIT. 



365 



to excite a spirit of rational talking rather than wit. But 
can no witty poems, no witty anecdotes, no play upon 
words, be discovered ? And is it not at first an easy mat- 
ter to let cliildren seek moral resemblances in physical 
substances, until their pinions have grown sufficiently 
strong to reach from mental to bodily resemblances? 
( Vide my Introduction to ^Esthetics, ii.) 

The author once presided for three years over a small 
school, comprising ten children of his friends ; the best 
head among his pupils, of different ages and sexes, had 
only mastered Cornelius Nepos. So, along with the 
Latin language, German, French, and English had to be 
begun, as well as the so-called practical sciences. The 
diaries of this eccentric school, — during whose holiday 
hours the Invisible Lodge and Hesperus were composed, 

— along with the confession of all his mistaken views, 
belong id the account of the author's life hereafter to be 
published- But what follows will find its right place 
here. After half a year's daily instruction for five hours, 
in the repetitions of which such witty resemblances as 
accident offered were sought, and during which the chil- 
dren had the Spartan permission to attack one another, — 
by which means when out of school they were preserved 
from the German fault of over-sensitiveness, — the author, 
to encourage the children and confirm the habit, made a 
manuscript book, entitled " Anthology of my Pupils' Bon- 
mots," in which he wrote in their presence every idea of 
a not merely local character. A few examples may serve 

to show his method. " A boy, G , twelve years old, 

the cleverest of the children, endowed with mathematical 
and satirical talents, said as follows: ^Man is imitated 
by four things, an echo, a shadow, an ape, and a mirror ; 

— the windpipe, the bigoted Spaniards, and ants suffer no 



366 LEVANA. 

foreign substance within their limits, but drive it out; — 
the air-bag of the whale, out of which it breathes when 
«nder water, is the water-stomach of the camel, whence 
it drinks when there is no other water ; — the conceal- 
ment of the Greeks in the Trojan horse was a living 
transmigration of souls ; — when calculations become 
longer, logarithms must be made of logarithms; — mer- 
cury is poison, and the mythological Mercury conducted 
souls both into heaven and hell," &c., &c. The same 
boy's younger brother, ten and a half years old, said: 
"God is the only perpetuum mobile ; — the Hungarians 
preserve both their wine and their beehives in the earth ; 
' — Constantinople looks beautiful from a distance, but 
ugly when near, and it stands upon seven hills ; so the 
planet Venus shines gloriously from a distance, but on 
approaching nearer you find it uneven and full of steep 
mountains," &c., &c. His sister, seven years old, said : 
*' Every night we are seized with apoplexy, but in the 
morning we are well again ; — the world is the body of 
God; — when the pulse beats quickly, we are ill; when 
slowly, well : so when the clouds move fast, they betoken 
foul weather; when slowly, fair weather; — when the 
Spartans were in battle, they wore red cloaks, so that the 
blood might not be seen ; and certain Italians wear black 
ones, so that you may not see the fleas ; — my school is a 
Quakers' meeting-house where every one may speak ; — 
the stupidest people dress themselves the most showily ; 
so the stupidest animals, insects, are the gaudiest," &c. 
Sometimes there were several fathers and mothers to the 
same idea ; one spark drew out the rest too quickly, and 
then they all justly insisted on a community of honor in 
the " Anthology of Bon-mots." 

Slavishness darkens and hides all the salt-springs of 



WIT. 367 

wit; hence those teachers who, like weak princes, can 
only maintain their position by the censorship of the 
press, will probably do wisely to choose walks, and leave 
the children at liberty in order to make them witty. 
The writer of the " Anthology of Bon-mots " permitted 
his scholars to exercise their wit upon, but not against, 
himself. 

A learned gentleman* fears danger to the sense of 
truth from these exercises of the wit, though he has no 
fault to find with the things themselves; but if so, he 
must also dread that something better, — sentiment, — 
tvhich takes the place of truth in our dark age, will be 
falsified by the forms of speech which teach and analyze 
its expression and its cause. And for what reason shall 
\vitty similes be held incompatible with truth, as if they 
also did not really, though not so obviously, illustrate it ? 
We do not recommend children any Olympic games of 
wit but such as are German ; and the Northern nature 
itself is so excellent a check to all over-excitement, that 
even a German university could redress the balance of 
the strong and pungent wit of two such men as Kastner 
and Lichtenberg, and learnedly held out against them in 
the learned journal of Gottingen. 

* A reviewer of Levana in " Gottinger Gelehrte-Anzeige," a liter- 
ary journal, so called, and still published at Gottingen. 



368 LEVANA. 



CHAPTER V. 

DEVELOPMENT OF REFLECTION, ABSTRACTION, AND SELF- 
KNOWLEDGE ; TOGETHER WITH AN EXTRA PARAGRAPH 
ON THE POWERS OF ACTION AND BUSINESS. 

§139. 

I MAY be most brief about what is most important ; 
for time and libraries are sufficiently prolix about it. 
The reflected contemplation of self, which conceals and 
annihilates the external and superterrene universe, by 
guiding and lowering man into his own inner world, now 
finds its mining-ladders in every book-shop. Moreover, 
our modern life, broken up into particles by the search 
after pleasure, and destitute of any great, active aims to 
unite mind and matter, is enough, without further cause, 
to make every one live within himself, and forget the 
universe until some shock to his nerves of feeling pain- 
fully reminds him of existence. If any men of the 
present age are of a poetical nature, life quickly becomes 
a desert to them, in whose undulating air, as in that of 
other deserts, objects appear both wavering and gigantic. 
If they are of a philosophical disposition, they fancy the 
ideal garden-ladder against which they lean to be a fruit- 
tree, its dead steps living branches, and mounting them to 
be gathering fruit. Hence self-destruction soon follows 
the philosophical destruction of the world. Hence there 
are more lunatics and fewer poets than formerly: the 
philosopher and the madman ceaselessly point with the 
left-hand index finger to the right hand, and cry out 
"Object, — Subject!" 

Consequently, in philosophical and poetical natures, 
always endeavor to postpone the reflecting observation of 



REFLECTION, ABSTRACTION, ETC. 3O9 

self until the glowing season of the passions, so that the 
child may garner and preserve a fresh, steadfast, and 
earnest life. 

Children of common and merely active dispositions, 
who do not so readily lose sight of the outer works of the 
world, may be advanced five years eai'lier, by the wheels 
of logic, physiology, and transcendental philosophy, into 
the citadel of the soul, so that they may learn thence to 
contemplate their course of life. The inner world is the 
remedy or antidote for the man of business ; as the exter- 
nal universe is for the philosopher. Poetry, as the happy 
union of both worlds, promotes the higher welfare of 
botli ; as, by it, that healthful reflection and abstraction 
are attained which raise man above want and time to a 
nobler view of life. 

§140. 

This is a suitable place to speak of the development of 
the faculties for business, the sense of the man of the 
world which, in contradistinction to reflection, is a media- 
tor between matter and mind ; but it serves to mix rather 
than to combine them indissolubly. This sense for the 
objects of sense, this presence of mind for what is exter- 
nally present, a quality so gloriously perfect in heroes, 
creates or annihilates things by the quickest combinations 
of such dissimilar materials as external and internal ob- 
servations, or sensations and ideas, by a simultaneous 
exercise of comprehension, foresight, and physical power. 
Like the two-headed eagle in the fable, which watched 
with one head while it took nourishment with the other, 
the man of tlie world must look at once within and with- 
out, unblinded by what is within, unalarmed by what is 
without ; and he must stand upon a point which, though 
16* X 



370 LEVANA. 

he himself move, yet never alters the circle nor changes 
its position. 

But it is difficult to provide a paloestra for the develop- 
ment of this power suited to boys ; they must contend 
with the only world they have about them, — that of 
education. It is not a fighting-school they must pass 
through, — for as yet they should have no enemies, — but 
tlrey may run a practising gauntlet against what lies in 
their way, and war upon things, not men. It is to be 
hoped that the teacher may find them the needful oppor- 
tunities. 



CHAPTEK VI. 



ON THE EDUCATION OF THE RECOLLECTION, NOT OF THE 

MEMORY. 

§ 141. 

THE difference between recollection and memory ig 
insisted upon by moralists more than by writers on 
education. Memory, a receptive, not a creative faculty, 
is subjected to physical conditions more than all other 
mental powers ; for every kind of weakness (direct and 
indirect, as well bleeding as intoxication) impairs it, and 
dreams interrupt it ; it is not subject to the will, is pos- 
sessed by us in common with the beasts ; and can be most 
effectually strengthened by the physician : a bitter stom- 
achic will increase it more than a whole dictionary learnt 
by heart. For if it gained strength by what it receives, 
it would grow with increasing years, that is, in proportion 
to its wealth in hoarded names; but it can carry the 



RECOLLECTION. 371 

heaviest burdens most easily in unpractised youth, and it 
holds those so firmly that they appear above the gray 
hairs of age as the evergreens of childhood. 

§ 142. 

On the contrary, recollection, the creative power, as free 
to call forth or to discover a consequence from the given 
ideas of memory, as wit or imagination are from their 
own stores ; this exercise of the will denied to beasts, 
which belongs chiefly to the mind, and therefore grows 
with its growth ; this faculty comes within the sphere of 
the educator. Hence, memory can be iron, recollection 
only quicksilver, and the graving-tool acts corrosively 
only on the former. The division of this power into 
memory for words and memory for things, is, therefore, 
erroneous, at least in expression. He who can retain in 
his head a page of Hottentot words will certainly much 
more easily retain a volume of Kant ; for either he un- 
derstands it, — and then every idea calls up an associated 
idea more readily than a word can a perfectly dissimilar 
word, — or he does not understand it; and then he r^f^rely 
retains a philosophical vocabulary, and uses it as well in 
every disputation, or for every combination, as many 
renowned students of the Critique already prove. But 
memory for things does not presuppose memory for 
names ; but only because, instead of being called memory 
for things, it ought to be called recollection. 

Recollection, like every other mental power, can only 
work according to the laws of association; not sounds, 
but things, that is to say, thoughts, educate. Read a vol- 
ume of history to a boy, and compare the copious abstract 
he can furnish of that with the miserable remnant he 
could collect from a page of Humboldt's Mex'can words 



372 LEVANA. 

which you had read aloud to him. Plattner remarks in 
his Anthropology, that things merely in juxtaposition are 
retained with more difficulty than things coming in se- 
quence : an animal, as it seems to me, would experience 
the very reverse ; and for this reason : memory applies 
to juxtaposition, recollection to sequence, because it, and 
not the former, excites to mental activity by causation, 
or some other association of ideas. Pythagoras recom- 
mended his pupils each evening to recall the events of 
the day, not solely as an act of self-mortification, but also 
as a means of strengthening the recollection. Kalov 
knew the whole Bible by heart ; Barthius. when but in 
his ninth year, Terence ; Sallust, Demo<:thenes ; and 
Scaliger learned Homer in twenty-one cays ; but then 
these are books full of intimately associated worths, not 
mere dictionaries ; a whole library with all its volumes is 
easier to retain, — for the connection assists the recollec- 
tion, — than a short list of them. When D'Alember^ 
makes the easy retention of a poem a proof of its excel 
lence, his position loses something of novelty, but gains in 
truth by the versus memoriales, mnemonic verses, and the 
laws of the ancient lawgivers promulgated in verse. He, 
in other words, observes, that the recollection is assisted 
by the close connection of the parts, a quality peculiarly 
possessed by good poems. Hence the Abbe Delille 
rightly regards his poems as better than, for instance, his 
translated originals ; not only because he has them in his 
mind before he transcribes them, and so can sell the pub- 
lisher his manuscript full of the final rhymes, to which he 
afterwards attaches the rest of the verse, — but also be- 
cause he cannot remember much of Milton or Virgil, 
although he has read both several times. 

To strengthen the combining power of the recollection, 



RECOLLECTION. 375 

accustom your children from their earliest years to relate 
to you some passage in history, or a tale ; and for this 
purpose the most diffusely told story is the best. Fur- 
ther, if you wish your child to advance rapidly, both in 
a foreign language and in power of recollection, do not 
set him to learn words, but a chapter which he has trans- 
lated a few times : here recollection assists the memory ; 
words are remarked in their verbal connection, and the 
best dictionary is a favorite book. 

It is more difficult to remember a single thing than 
many joined together. The example of Lessing, who 
always devoted himself exclusively for a time to one par- 
ticular branch of knowledge, proves the truth of Locke's 
remark, that the way to become learned is to pursue one 
subject only for a considerable period. The reason lies in 
the systematic nature of the recollection ; it is certain that 
a science will adhere more closely which has had time to 
spread its roots in the soil. Hence nothing so much en- 
feebles the recollection as leaps from one branch of the 
tree of knowledge to another ; as men become forgetful 
who have the management of several dissimilar offices. 
Let your child pursue one and the same branch of 
knowledge uninterruptedly for a month ; what a proba- 
bility of growth in twelve branches during the year I 
The dislike of the sameness will soon be last in the 
plea^ure of progress ; and the science thus grounded and 
daily increasing its limits will in time present a variety 
of flowers. Certainly the foundations of every science 
should be laid and worked upon for some time without 
the intermixture of any other ; then a new one may be 
commenced, and the other repeated for a change ; and 
tlius we may proceed, until, after the careful erection of 
the scafft»lding, we may begin the building, and not till 



374 LEVAXA. 

many of these are completed can a street be formed. 
For a contemporaneous multiplicity of scienceii is not 
adapted to early youth, which is only capable of embra- 
cing an individual subject, — but to maturer age, which 
can compare them together. 

Recollection by association of place, — falsely called 
memoria localis^ — this play-room of the so-called arts of 
memory, — shows the necessity of connection. For this 
reason travelling enfeebles local recollection. A prison, 
said a Frenchman, is a memoria localis ; and many, Bas- 
sompierre for example, have therein written their memoirs 
solely on the walls — of the skull. 

§143. 

But there is one mental talisman even for the memory, 
— I mean the charm of the object. A woman retains 
the titles of books with as much difficulty as her learned 
husband does the names of fasliionable dresses ; an old 
philologist, oblivious of other things, does not suffer an 
unknown word to escape his verbal treasure-house. 

No one has a memory for everytliing, because no one 
feels an interest in everything. And the physical powers 
set bounds even to the strengthening influence of desire 
on the memory, — think of that when with children, — 
for instance, if a Hebrew bill of exchange for a thousand 
pounds were promised, on condition of demanding its pay- 
ment in the very words of the document, as once read 
aloud, everybody would try to remember them, but, unless 
he were a Jew, the words and the form would fail him. 

If grown-up people find italics and German-text useful 
to mark their memoranda, I should think it possible that 
little children also might require i<ome sucli assistance. 
But teachers instigate them to make uninterrupted marks, 



RECOLLECTION. 375 

and then, when thej have printed whole books (or 
lessons) in italic or German-text, ask, with wonder, 
" whether it is possible a thing can be overlooked, written 
in different or large text ? " Permit something to be 
forgotten, when you desire them to remember so much. 

Resemblance, the rudder of recollection, is the danger- 
ous rock of memory. Among related objects, only one 
can exert the charm of novelty or priority. Thus, the 
correct spelling of very similar words, such as contemn 
condemn, were where, of off, is more difficult than that of 
totally different ones. There are few aged men who 
remain at home, and are able to remember or relate the 
little circumstances of their monotonous life for a fortnight ; 
by the constant recurrence of the daily echo, the history 
of their lives is as much shortened as life itself is pro- 
longed. The history of the fourth or fifth ten years of 
life shrivels up into a note, compared with the chapter on 
the fourth or fifth year. An eternity might at last be- 
come shorter than a moment. 

It is incomprehensible to me, how people fancy they can 
teach children to read or write the letters easily by point- 
ing out their resemblances, and laying before them at 
once i y, c e, or, in writing, i r, h k, &c. The very oppo- 
site plan ought to be pursued ; i should be placed next g, 
V next z, next r ; the contrast, like light and shadow, 
make both prominent ; until reflected lights and half 
shades can separate them anew from each other. The 
fast-rooted dissimilarities serve at last to hold fast the re- 
semblance that exists among them. So the old plan of 
teaching spelling by lists of words alphabetically arranged 
is bad, on account of the difficulty of distinguishing simi- 
lar sounds ; whereas that of classing together derivatives 
from the same Latin or Greek word assists the reraem- 



376 LEVANA. 

brance, because the radical word does not alter. If in- 
struction in arts of memory had a place in the Levana, I 
might suggest the following sportive methods : daily 
drawing tickets in a spelling-lottery, where each child 
would not only observe his own, but his companions' 
words ; every pupil might each day receive a foreign word 
of parole, wherewith to greet his teacher : or the scholar 
might be set to print a short Latin sentence, with its trans- 
lation ; or he might be told to write the same word in 
various styles of penmanship : in dates, for which these 
metliods are much more necessary than for words, the 
teacher might give the years written merely with conso- 
nants, because the addition of the necessary vowels would 
impress the whole line on the memory ; and he might cut 
wortJiless maps into sections, allow his pupils to take them 
home, and expect them to be brought back joined togeth- 
er in the fashion of architectural games ; and so forth : it 
were, indeed, a miserable prospect if hundreds of such 
arts did not occur to the teacher. I myself, however, 
would not choose any of these proposed methods of catch- 
ing and yoking attention, but would adopt that of steady 
industry. I do believe that a rod would help a creeping 
child to walk better than crutches under his arms, which 
at iirst carry, but afterwards are carried by him. Yea 
yea, nay nay, are the best double watchwords for chil- 
dren. 

§ 144. 

Artemidorus, the grammarian, forgot everything when 
he was terrified. Fear cripples the memory, both by pro- 
ducing physical weakness and mental irritation ; the frost 
of cold fear chains every living power which it approach- 
es. The bonds are removed even from the criminal, 



KECOLLECTION. 



377 



when he is to speak and be judged ! And yet many 
teachers put fresh fetters on their pupils before they hear, 
and threaten before they teach them. Do they suppose 
tlie terrified soul can observe or remember anything 
better than the pain of fear, and the blows of the stick ? 
Can the free glance of the mental eye coexist with the 
abject slavery of the heart? Will the poor sinner on 
the scaffold embrace the beauties of the surrounding land- 
scape, and in contemplating them forget the impending 
axe? 



EIGHTH FRAGMENT. 



Chap. I. Beauty limited to the Outward Sense, §§ 145, 146; to the 
Inner Sense, \^ 147, 148. — Chap. II. Classical Education, §§ 149, 
150. 



CHAPTER I. 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE SENSE OF BEAUTY. 




§ 145. 

USE the expression sense of beauty instead 
of taste ; taste for the subhrae, sounds as badly 
as smell for the subhme. The P^rench publish 
one of the best instructions on taste, under the 
title Almanack des Gourmands. Further ; the sense of 
beauty is not the same as the instinctive desire to express 
beauty ; the development and improvement of this latter 
faculty belongs properly to schools of art. If your boy, 
even in the school-room, is taught to produce, instead of 
only to feel and see, beautiful forms and beautiful thoughts, 
he is as much spoiled as if he were a father before being 
a lover. Nothing is more dangerous, either for art or 
heart, than the premature expression of feeling ; many a 
poetic genius has been fatally chilled by delicious 
draughts of Hippocrene in the warm season of youth. 
The feelings of the poet especially should be closely and 
coolly covered, and the hardest and driest sciences should 



SENSE OF BEAUTY. 379 

retard the bursting blossoms till the due spring-time. 
Pope, when a boy, wrote poems of sentiment ; when a 
man, epigrams. It is said that every clever man, such as 
Leibnitz and Kant, for instance, must have written verses 
in his youth : this may be very true of him who writes 
none in maturer life ; the philosopher, the mathematician, 
the statesman, may begin where the poet ends, and vice 
versa ! The poet is the only one who reveals the most 
secret, the holiest, and the tenderest aspirations of human- 
ity ; let him then attain the full stature of his model 
before he copies it. Let him, like the beautiful white 
butterfly, first live on the leaves of the schools, and unfold 
his wings when the flowers hold honey. 

§ 146. 

Children, like women, always kindly disposed towards 
pedants, would not think it utterly ridiculous if one at- 
tempted, for instance, to instil into a boy admiration for 
a girl's beautiful features by displaying drawings of hid- 
eous noses, lips, and necks, and along with them beautiful 
paintings of the same parts, so that when the young man 
left the school of design, he might at once fall in love with 
a beautiful woman as judiciously as a simpleton who had 
never been to school. 

Something very similar is done by those teachers who 
try to educate the sense of the sublime ; which, however, 
is not increased, but diminished, by the given examples 
of sublimity. The circumnavigator of the world does not 
think the sea so sublime as does his wife, who views it 
only from the coast; the stars come at last to look smaller 
in the naked eye of an astronomer than in ours. 

In fact, men want to educate everything (themselves 
excepted) which will certainly educate itself; and they 



380 LEVANA. 

do this the more earnestly because the result is certain 
and irresistible, as in walking, seeing, tasting, &c. : but 
for the sense of artistic beauty, which peculiarly needs 
education, schools are rarely built. 

A child may be conducted into the artistic realm of 
beauties appreciable by the outward senses, such as paint- 
ing, music, architecture, earlier than into that of beauties 
appreciable only by the mind, such as poetry. Above all 
things, educate the German eye, which is so far behind 
the German ear. Conceal from him every distortion of 
shape or drawing, — one might add of the streets, if 
it were possible to hide the gitjtesque appearance of 
our houses, dresses, and ornaments, or rather disligure- 
ments, — and surround his beauteous age with beauty. 
The example of the critically correct Italians proves 
that an artist's hand is not the necessary accompaniment 
of an artist's eye. Open a child's eye, more than his 
heart, to the beauties of nature; the latter opens naturally 
in its proper season, and sees farther and more beauties 
than those you place before it. Unfortunately little can 
be accomplished in this direction by your unaided efforts ; 
only the state — which, however, loves better to carve 
its wood into parade-beds than cradles of art — can pro- 
vide true education for the eye, which is best taught by 
streets, temples, and gardens. Must royalty and art be 
everywhere as far distant from each other as the Sun and 
Venus, — a space which a cannon-ball would require sev- 
enteen years to traverse ? The former paragraph clearly 
excludes poets from the proposed school of art. A great 
poetic gallery, filled with novices, gathered together for 
the express purpose of poetizing, could at most but fur- 
nish poems upon poetry and poets, in short, but mock- 
heroic imitations ; an evil which the acquirement of tech- 



SENSE OF BEAUTY. 3^1 

nical facility, the great advantage of a school for art, does 
not compensate. A true poet must, like Shakespeare and 
Cervantes, have struggled with life and all its conditions ; 
then he may take the pencil, not merely to lay color by 
color, but to paint his soul upon the canvas. If an inti- 
mate acquaintance with poems led to writing poems, actors 
ought to have written the best plays. 

An artistic school for the ear is less required from 
deficiency of teachers, patterns, and energy, than from 
a superfluity of them, for sometimes the teachers w^ill 
drown one another, though at the risk of being them- 
selves out of tune. Fortunately it is more difficult to 
change or destroy the simple taste of the hearing, than of 
the seeing or reading, pubhc. Behind the most sensitive 
ear the heart always remains open to the simplest melo- 
dies : the virtuoso alone is his own empoisoner. 

§ 147. 

If the art of poetry have been pronounced, and with 
justice, to embrace all human nature, to be the Venus 
girdle which enchantingly combines the most opposite 
powers, the most graceful alternate transformation of 
form into subject, and this again into that, like the 
candle whose flame assumes a shape, and yet through 
which the wick is visible ; if this be so, we must indeed 
wonder that the study of this unity in plurality should be 
appointed for that time of life in which variety is small, 
and the power of combining it weak, or even erring. 
Must not children resemble nations on whom the sun 
of beauty first shone after the tempest of their wants was 
stilled ? And does not poetry, the bridal ornament of 
Psyche, require her to be full-grown and a bride ? Be- 
fore the thirteenth or fourteenth year, before the time of 



382 LEVANA. 

opening manhood, which throws a romantic splendor 
round sun, and moon, and spring, and sex, and poetry, 
the child regards poetical flowers as so many dried medi- 
cinal herbs. The error of prematurely introducing a 
child to the treasures of poetry can only arise from the 
aesthetic mistake of believing the spirit of poetry to con- 
sist less in the whole, than in its variously-scattered, daz- 
zling charms of sound, pictures, events, and feelings ; for 
these, a child has naturally a ready ear. Rhymers and 
verse-writers may, indeed, play a useful part at an early 
age. Rhyme delights both the most uncultivated and the 
youngest ear ; and the harmony of full-sounding prose 
will soon melt the little soul. Instructive poetry, resem- 
bling circular light-holders, also is good. Songs, too, are 
passable. Tales, particularly Oriental tales, the Arabian 
Nights' Entertainments, (those romantic summer nights, 
so short whether to men or children !) will arouse the 
dreaming poetic heart with gentle charms until it is after- 
wards strong enough to comprehend the lofty lyric ode, 
the wide-extended level epic, the thronging passions of 
tragedy. 

When manhood and womanhood have kindled the tran- 
sitory joy-fires of life, and all their powers seek unity and 
the future, then let the poet approach, and be the Orpheus 
who animates dead bodies, as well as tames wild beasts. 
But what poets shall the teacher bring ? 

§ 148. 

Our own ! Neither Greek, nor Roman, nor Hebrew, 
nor Indian, nor French, but German. Let the English- 
man select English poets, and every nation its own. 
Only when we call to mind the poverty of the Dark 
Ages, whose seeming corpse the miracles of Greece and 



SENSE OF BEAUTY. 383 

Rome reanimated, can we comprehend the existing ab- 
surdity of not educating and preparing the mind by 
means of native, related, and young beauties, for those 
of foreign and distant ages ; but of precisely reversing 
the matter, and placing him among strangers, instead of 
those who speak his mother tongue. The quickest com- 
prehension and perception of all the secondary tints in a 
poet's work, the intensest feeling for its subject, the widest 
embrace of its aim, and of its humor, — all this is only 
possible to the reader of his own countryman, not of any 
foreign wonderful being ; if the actual conditions of his 
native country help the poet to color, they also help the 
reader to see : she was a Roman who at once inspired 
Raffaelle, — the Roman, — as a mistress and a Madonna. 
Must we in the ]Sorth dig all our beauties and hopes, like 
vases and uras, out of sepulchres ? 

We may do so rightly if we speak only of vases and 
similar objects ; that is to say, of the artistic education of 
the eye. The most beautiful forms should be first pre- 
sented to the eye, — a Grecian Venus to a Chinese. But 
if the education of the inner sense is the object, offer the 
nearest first. The outer sense accustoms itself, by degrees, 
to the most preposterous forms, as all journals of fashion 
show, and becomes attached to them by length of time ; 
the inner sense is formed by the contemplation of childish 
beauties to the comprehension of mental beauty. Begin 
with Raffaelle and Gluck, but not with Sophocles. 

At home and at school let the native poets be first 
placed on the altar as gods of the household and the 
country ; let the little child rise from the lesser to the 
greater gods. What love of country must not that hang- 
ing on the lips of native poets inspire ! And to what 
beautiful, slow reading should we not be accustomed, (for 



384 LEVANA. 

the German reads everything quickly that is not very far 
removed in distance, age, and language,) if one of Klop- 
stock's odes, for instance, were as critically dissected a:? 
one of Horace's ! What power should we not obtain over 
our own language, if, at the age when schoolmasters 
usually discourse about Pindar and Aristophanes, we 
were introduced to the sonorous odes of Klopstock and 
Voss, into the antique temple of Goethe, the lofty dome 
of Schiller ! For even our own language must speak to 
us according to a model, if it is to produce any effect. 
Hence the old humanists (and some modern ones too) 
wrote Latin best, and both old and new worldlings write 
French best, and both parties often wrote miserable Ger- 
man: Leibnitz and the Rectors on the one side, and 
Frederick the Great on the other, confirm my observa- 
tion. 



CHAPTER II. 

CLASSICAL EDUCATION. 



§149. 

FOR the sake of brevity, I begin this chapter with 
the request that the reader will first peruse, in the 
Invisible Lodge, Book First, the supplement headed 
" Why I give my Gustavus witty and bad authors, but 
forbid the classical, I mean Greek and Latin writers " ; 
thereby I shall be spared both copying and printing it 
over again ; and also the bad attempt to clothe the same 
thoughts, or soul, with another body. I have not yet 
met with any refutation of that paragraph; nor, during 



CLASSICAL EDUCATION. 385 

the twenty years which have elapsed since its pubhca- 
tion, have I been able to refute myself. 

Wliat follows might be appended to a second or third 
edition. 

I ask whether those men who have given us Wieland's 
explanation of the satires of Horace, Voss's translation 
of Homer, Schleiermacher's introductory translations of 
Plato's discourses, have sprung from that Latin town 
which Maupertuis recommended to be founded ? Only 
men of mind, of power, and of education, completed by 
more and higher studies than mere philology, only chil- 
dren born on fortunate days, such as Goethe and Herder, 
have ever seen the spirit of antiquity ; the rest have only 
beheld, instead, treasures of words, and gleanings of flow- 
ers. Is it not madness to think it even possible that a 
boy of fourteen or sixteen, however great his abihties, can 
comprehend the harmony of poetry and deep thought con- 
tained in one of Plato's discourses, or the worldly persi- 
flage of Horace's satires, when the genius itself has not 
conducted the men I name to the pure cold heights of 
antiquity until long after the fiery season of youth ? 
Why do teachers demand what they can so seldom do 
themselves ? I entreat them to think partly of the indif- 
ference with which they and the Italian savans await the 
unrolling of the eight hundred manuscripts in Herculane- 
um ; partly of the stupidity with which they first mistook, 
and afterwards criticised, the new Greek spirit of Goethe 
in his elegies on the antique at Weimar ; partly of the 
numberless mistakes they have made in attributing a Gre- 
cian resemblance to many a flat production, merely on 
account of its German dulness and French form, and 
denying it to such pure, powerful works as those of Her- 
der. And does not the preference which the youth of o?ir 

17 Y 



386 LEVAXA. 

universities manifests towards every new haii-}- comet, 
really show what is effected by the ancient astronomy in 
our youthful training-places ? And is it possible, even if 
all other things were different, that the tender, indivisible 
form of beauty can be appreciated if grammatic divisions 
break it, like the Medicean Venus, into thirteen frag- 
ments, and thirty smaller pieces ? What, in tliis case, the 
youth may gladly confound with the enjoyment of the 
whole, and with the goddess of flowers, is the pleasure 
derived from some wayside flower in the sandy desert of 
philological exercises ; and the ordinary teacher mistakes 
his sand-bath for the floral deity. This perversity causes 
the study of the ancients, which must present its casket 
of phrases at every boy's toilet, to give his concetti to the 
Italian, his host of synonymes to the English, and to the 
German every taste whicli he can find. And thus the 
new age is lost to us by the wounds of beauty. 

§ 150. 

Let antiquity be the Venus and morning star which 
rises over the evening of our North. It depends on our 
position, with regard to the star of beauty, whether it 
shall shine upon us with a full or only a partial light. 
The language of the ancients is a very different thing. 
So, again, is the spirit of their history, or subject ; and, 
thirdly, the spirit of their form, or poetry. 

The learning of the ancient languages, and their har- 
monic beauty, has no prematurity to dread ; but why are 
these canonical writings of the spirit desecrated into books 
for teaching the alphabet and reading ? Do not people 
understand that no mind, least of all a child's, can turn at 
once in such opposite directions as language and subject, 
even though it be a poet's subject, require ? 



CLASSICAL EDUCATION. 387 

Especial care should be taken never to reduce a reality 
to a mere arrangement of words, particularly because the 
recollection rejects as indigestible all single, isolated mat- 
ters. If the fact stands prominently forth, the word or 
name is often lost sight of. Tims it has frequently been 
remarked, that those boys find it most difficult to remem- 
ber the names of the heroes in ancient Greek or Roman 
story who have their deeds impressed most vividly on 
their minds. So, in novels, the interest of the story, and 
of the hero, will sometimes make a young lady read the 
whole without knowing the names of the hero or heroine, 
which yet stand upon every page, ax>d cause her to forget 
them in their lives as completely as the Greeks, who, 
according to Lessing, named their tragedies after persons 
who did not appear in them. 

What Greek or Latin books are the most suitable for 
teaching those languages ? Partly imitations, which may 
be made in order not to lead a deaf and dumb spirit to 
the divine oracles of the ancients ; partly also those an- 
cient books which possess most interest for the youthful 
mind : for instance, the younger Pliny (as a forerunner 
of the French letter-writers) ^ and even the elder Pliny ; 
at least he is much more suitable than Tacitus, so full of 
poison, the world, and life ; also Luca-n. Seneca, Ovid- 
Martial, Quinctilian, Cicero"? youthfnl orations, &c. 

In Greek the romantic OOyssey, in -spite of its impor- 
tance, might occupy an early place, then Plutarch, JEUsin, 
and even the Plutarch of philosophers, Dioarenes Laertius. 
The ages of iron and brass, hke the metak after which 
they are named, should be laid at once on the surface, and 
the nobler metals raised afterwards upon thena. Xn shorty 
to obtain strength, observe the Gre.^-ic^o law, whioli forcada 
athletes even to look upon beauties. 



388 LEVANA. 

The fortifications round the city of God have been laid 
by the ancients for every age in the history of their own. 
The present ranks of humanity would sink irrecoverably 
if the youth did not take its way through the silent tem- 
ple of the mighty past into the market-place of after life. 
The names of Socrates, Cato, Epaminondas, and others, 
are pyramids of the power of will. Rome, Athens, Sparta, 
are the three crowning cities of the giant Geryon ; and 
after ages fix their eyes on the youth as on the primitive 
mountains of humanity. Not to know the ancients is to 
be an ephemeron, which neither sees the sun rise nor 
set. But do not expose this antique temple as though it 
were a receptacle for cast-off customs and phrases, and as 
though its holy relics, instead of being worshipped, might, 
like warriors' bones, be converted into knife-handles, and 
the like. The man can draw the history of the ancients 
from their own springs ; the child may draw them from 
the man : one ancient alone I would except, Plutarch, 
from whose hand the young may receive the animating 
palm-wine of the mighty past. But schoolmasters will- 
ingly sacrifice the purification of the soul by ancient 
history to a pure Grecian. So Demosthenes, destitute 
of ornament, poor in flowery garlands, rich in chains of 
argument, and rich in ands, is sacrificed to sounding, 
flowery Cicero. 

It were surely well to consult the age and advancement 
of the pupils in schools, and begin with the easier classical 
authors, Cicero, Virgil, Livy, Herodotus, Anacreon, Tyr- 
taeus, Euripides ; afterwards advancing to the more difii- 
cult, Horace, Caesar, Lucretius, Sophocles, Plato, Aris- 
tophanes. Here, as is natural, that orderly dishonor is 
scorned by which masters place the difficulty of undei-- 
standing an author in the phrases, rather than in the 



CLASSICAI f.ll CATION. 389 

higher spirit ; just similar!} in a French schoo. Goethe 
would be read by the lower classes;, Schiller by the sec- 
ond, Ilaller by the first, and I by ncbo^ly. I call Virgil 
an easy classical author; Caesar a diflicu^t one ; the odes 
of Horace are easy, his satires difiicult ; IHopstock is 
oftener easy than Goethe, because merely verbal *iiffi- 
oulties may be overcome by teaching and industry, but 
mental diificulties only by the maturity of thought, nrhich 
comes with years. 

If it be asked where time is to be found for the so- 
called knowledge of things, and the studies whereby a 
hvelihood is to be obtained, since their subjects constantly 
increase, and we resemble an army, the last ranks of 
which must march quickest, — I tranquilly answer. Give* 
natural philosophy and natural history, astronomy and 
geometry, and abundant supplies of " bread studies," in 
the school-rooms and lecture-rooms of your gymnasiums ; 
and in so doing you will give the boys ten times more 
pleasure than they receive from the unfolding of the 
mummy-bandages of the ancient graces ; thus, too, you 
impart the common nourishment needed by both the 
future divisions of your pupils into sons of the muses and 
sons of labor. Then the higher schools are reserved for 
the instructions of the greatest teachers, the ancients. 



388 LEVANA. 

The fortifications round the city of God have been laid 
by the ancients for every age in the history of their own. 
The present ranks of humanity would sink irrecoverably 
if the youth did not take its way through the silent tem- 
ple of the mighty past into the market-place of after life. 
The names of Socrates, Cato, Epaminondas, and others, 
are pyramids of the power of will. Rome, Athens, Sparta, 
are the three crowning cities of the giant Geryon ; and 
after ages fix their eyes on the youth as on the primitive 
mountains of humanity. Not to know the ancients is to 
be an ephemeron, which neither sees the sun rise nor 
set. But do not expose this antique temple as though it 
were a receptacle for cast-off customs and phrases, and as 
though its holy relics, instead of being worshipped, might, 
like warriors' bones, be converted into knife-handles, and 
the like. The man can draw the history of the ancients 
from their own springs ; the child may draw them from 
the man : one ancient alone I w^ould except, Plutarch, 
from whose hand the young may receive the animating 
palm-wine of the mighty past. But schoolmasters will- 
ingly sacrifice the purification of the soul by ancient 
history to a pure Grecian. So Demosthenes, destitute 
of ornament, poor in flowery garlands, rich in chains of 
argument, and rich in ands, is sacrificed to sounding, 
flowery Cicero. 

It were surely well to consult the age and advancement 
of the pupils in schools, and begin with the easier classical 
authors, Cicero, Virgil, Livy, Herodotus, Anacreon, Tyr- 
taeus, Euripides ; afterwards advancing to the more diffi- 
cult, Horace, Caesar, Lucretius, Sophocles, Plato, Aris- 
tophanes. Here, as is natural, that orderly dishonor is 
scorned by wdiich masters place the difficulty of under- 
standing an author in the phrases, rather than in the 



CLASSICAI f.tl CATION. 389 

higher spirit ; just similar!} in a French schoo. Goethe 
■Nvould be read by the lower classec^, Schiller by the sec- 
ond, Ilaller by the first, and I by ncbcly. I call Virgil 
an easy classical author ; Coesar a difficult one ; the odes 
of Horace are easy, his satires difficult ; IHopstock is 
oftener easy than Goethe, because merely vex'bal diffi- 
culties may be overcome by teaching and industr3^ but 
mental difficulties only by the maturity of thought, ^hich 
comes with years. 

If it be asked where time is to be found for the so- 
called knowledge of things, and the studies whereby a 
livelihood is to be obtained, since their subjects constantlv 
increase, and we resemble an army, the last ranks ot 
which must march quickest, — I tranquilly answer. Give* 
natural philosophy and natural history, astronomy and 
geometry, and abundant supplies of " bread studies," in 
the school-rooms and lecture-rooms of your gymnasiums ; 
and in so doing you will give the boys ten times more 
pleasure than they receive from the unfolding of the 
mummy-bandages of the ancient graces ; thus, too, you 
impart the common nourishment needed by both the 
future divisions of your pupils into sons of the muses and 
sons of labor. Then the higher schools are reserved for 
the instructions of the greatest teachers, the ancients. 



NINTH FRAGMENT, OR CONCLUSION. 




§ 151. 
TREATISE on education does not include 
the theory of instruction, whose wide realm 
embraces the mistakes of all sciences and arts ; 
nor the theory of remedies, which would re- 
quire libraries instead of volumes for the complication of 
mistakes, years, positions, and relations. At the same 
time no science is entirely disconnected from the rest ; 
the feet cannot move without the hands. 

§ 152. 
Lavater, in a painted series of four-and-twenty faces, 
converted a frog's head into an Apollo's : I would that a 
poem could, in a similar way, depict the restoration of 
some naturally gifted but ruined child to the pure features 
of humanity, instead of taking a sun-god to school as 
Xenophon and Rousseau did. Yes, one might exhibit 
an educational history of many false cures effected on the 
same human limb ; and it would be nothing else than 
useful and difficult. How often has not the ill-set arm of 
humanity to be broken afresh so as to be rightly healed ! 

§ 153. 
The best and most complete education cannot exhibit 
its true power upon one child, but upon a number of 



CONCLUSION. 391 

united children; — romantic Cjropedagogues of one indi- 
vidual should think of this: — a lawgiver influences mul- 
titudes by multitudes ; one Jew alone could not produce 
a Moses. But this very Mosaic people — which has 
spread unaltered through the ocean of all time, as sea- 
plants in all the zones of the ocean, and has retained its 
Mosaic coloring even when burning Africa has changed 
its bodily hue — is the strongest witness to the power of 
education, for, during its dispersion, the Mosaic education 
of the people can only be maintained by private educa- 
tion. Let this fact inspire all parents with courage to 
disregard all that is malignant in the future into which 
they must send theii* children. 

§154. 

For the same reason this courage should not be les- 
sened by a well-known contradictory appearance ; namely> 
that children, like plants acclimatized to the nursery and 
school-room, can scarcely be recognized in a strange 
apartment, in a carriage, in the country, or at midnight. 
*' It was all forced fruit," says then the good, vexed father, 
" and I have lost my labor and my hope." But if the 
angry man will then sit down and consider that he, a 
plant equally acclimatized to his position, has frequently 
been made unlike himself by strangeness of place or cir- 
cumstances, yet with \ery transitory injury to his powers, 
he may cool his wrath, by applying the same observation, 
though in a stronger degree, to his children, who, being 
more excitable, feeble, and inexperienced, must naturally 
obey and succumb to every new presence. 

§ lo5. 
In some cironmstanres we cannot be sufficiently diffuse 



392 



LEVANA. 



with children, in others not sufficiently short. Speak at 
greatest length in tales, and when you wish to give the 
passions time to cool, as a kind of rhetorical signal that 
something important is to come. The utmost brevity 
should be used in confronting logical sentences for exer- 
cise, — in forbidding, — and further, in necessary punish- 
ments ; then, after the billows are laid, loquacity may be 
advantageously resumed. 

§ 156. 

If a father is boldly obedient to the right inile of letting 
a boy, especially one destined to a learned profession, lie 
fallow during the iirst five years of life, only learning 
what he teaches himself, so that his body may. become 
' strong enough to bear its future mental treasures, let him 
be prepared when the child first goes to school for a 
difficulty which may, perhaps, last some months : it is 
this, — that the boy, hitherto accustomed only to his own 
mental teaching, cannot immediately apply with ease to 
instruction from without, but receives the foreign rays at 
first as in a dispersing concave glass. But by and by 
they will be collected and combined by a convex mirror. 
Since I have again fallen on the subject of instruction, 
which, especially in later years, becomes continually more 
and more closely combined with education, I know not 
how better to make amends for my digression than by 
pursuing it, and saying that a boy of five years old can 
be sent to no better preparatory school for a learned edu- 
cation, though but for a few hours daily, than to one of 
only three classes, Latin, mathematics, and history. In 
fact, these three kinds of knowledge attune the mind to 
the threefold harmony of education. First, the Latin 
language, by its brevity and great dissimilarity to our 



CONCLUSION. 39J 

owii, exercises the child's mind in logic, and is, therefore, 
a preparatory school of philosophy. Brevity of speech 
gives comprehensiveness of thought. Secondly, mathe- 
matics, as a mediator between the intuitions of the senses 
and of the mind, excites and forms a power distinct from 
philosophy, and not sufficiently esteemed in its connection 
with the material universe ; which, by the analyzing of 
space from without, and time from within, brings the 
ultimate conclusions of numbers within the power of 
thouglit. Thirdly, history, like religion, unites all learn- 
ing and power ; especially ancient history, that is, the 
history of the nations of the youthful world, Grecian and 
Koman, Jewish and early Christian. As the epic poem 
and the romance may be made to contain the floating 
materials of all knowledge, their mother, History, may still 
moix) easily be made into the firm pulpit of every moral 
and religious opinion ; and every department of morality, 
moral theology, moral philosophy and casuistry, finds its 
leader in ancient history. The young heart lives in the 
mighty youthful past, and, by this active art of poetry, 
buried centuries are raised from the dead in a few school- 
hours. The devils removed into historic distance grieve 
less, and tempt far less, tlian when standing in our pres- 
ence ; the angels, on the contrary, cleared by distance 
fiom neighboring mists, shine and sparkle more brilliantly 
than ever ; and they tell us what there is yet to do in the 
future which may be worthy of the past. History — if 
you are not determined to make it into the biography of 
the Devii — is the third Bible ; for the book of nature i? 
the second ; and ancient liistory alone can convert anii 
improve modern history. 

Tlie fatlier of the Levana — although in the case of a 
goddess this name would be more humbly and appropric 

17* 



396 LEVANA. 

and people attached to them expressly to torment. No 
one torments better than one who has himself been tor- 
mented, — monks, for instance. If you wish me to weep, 
says Horace, you must first weep yourself. And the 
schoolmaster can do the last ; no one could have better 
sat to an Albert Durer, who loved to paint crucifixions, 
than the united body of German schoolmasters ; and if 
the crucifixion came at the conclusion of Christ's ministry, 
with us they accompany each other. England, which 
gives a sub-rector a yearly salary of a thousand pounds, 
will apparently attain this end less quickly — although in 
all its schools it will exalt the rod to the post of educa- 
tional honor — than countries where, as in Prussia, the 
whole average salaries of schoolmasters amount only to 
250 thalers ; so we may fairly reckon that 184 masters 
may be pointed out, who only receive from five to ten 
thalers.* Five thalers ! — Certainly it might be less, 
and in Baireuth it is so ; for there a village schoolmaster 
receives from every pupil, for the months of November, 
December, January, February, March, and April, twenty- 
four kreuzers, or a monthly stipend of four kreuzers. 
But the schoolmaster — which perhaps would not be 
expected — grows fat in the summer holidays, because 
he goes out to pasture with the cattle (it is only in winter 
that he is a shepherd of souls). The evil effects of this 
system soon break out in him, for he drives the cattle 
away from wrong roads with much fewer blows than the 
children. The receipt of four kreuzers repaid by pain ! 

Isocrates wept from shame to receive college fees, 
amounting to three thousand pounds, from his hundred 
pupils : might not shame and weeping find a more appro- 
priate place here ? Happily the state, which converts 
* Alg. Lit. Zeitung. No. 267. 1806. 



CONCLUSION. 397 

schools into industrial schools for the pupils rather than 
tlie masters, declares tliat none but clergymen shall be 
schoolmasters, and students of divinity house tutors for 
the higher classes of pupils (as the Dahii Lama may only 
be attended by priests). Theologians are active Tiieopa- 
schists, and every Bible comes into their hands sooner 
than the Bihlia in nummis ; for it has ever been a Prot- 
estant principle, in order not to separate them too far 
from the Catholic clergy, to compel the Lutheran minis- 
ters strictly to keep the vows of poverty. In short, 
they have little ; therefore, all the more is to be taken 
from them by giving them the office of schoolmasters. 

If we ascend to the higher scholastic positions, we 
find that where the young men, having attained the honor 
of the gymnasium, need fewer mortifications, there also 
the teachers require fewer ; thus, a head-master always 
receives a trifle more pay than his subordinate. To 
which is to be added a second reason ; that the latter has 
more work, and, consequently, requires more spurring, 
more oil in the joints and wheels, to accomplish his 
heavier movements, — that is to say, more unemployed 
gastric juice. For, according to an ancient political law, 
the labor and trouble of an office increase in reverse pro- 
portion to its remuneration, and, where the former are alto- 
gether wanting, there that law of the artisans is acted 
upon, according to which, every travelling journeyman 
who cannot find work in a place receives a present. 

It is, however, so ordered, that even in the highest 
school offices, as in fruitful Hindostan, where there are 
yearly three harvests and a famine, the four quarterly 
harvests shall not always exclude a famine. As regards 
drink, we know, from Langen's clerical law, that Karpzov 
bestowed on all school-teachers the privilege of exemption 



398 LEVANA. 

from tax on all liquors. In this, the state has not had so 
much regard, as at first appears, to the wants and thirst 
of the profession, but has followed the old custom of 
giving still greater privileges to schoolmasters ; such 
as exemption from the taxes on Tokay wine and pheas- 
ants, and license for all their pearls and jewels to enjoy 
the immunities of students' goods. 

§ 157. 

But enough of this ! I spoke above of a hostile future 
for our children : every father holds out this prospect, 
which he has inherited from his own. Who, indeed, has 
been so blessed, when finally closing his eyes, as to con- 
template two fair worlds, his own yet hidden, and one 
left behind for his children ? The whole of humanity 
always seems to us a salt sea, which the sweet showers 
and streams of individuals do not sweeten ; yet the pure 
water on the earth is as little dried up as the salt sea ; 
nay, it even rises from it. Therefore, O father, the 
higher thou thinkest thyself, whether truly or not, exalted 
above thy age, (consequently above its daughters, whom 
yet thou must, however unwillingly, see thy children 
marry,) all the more thank-offerings hast thou to lay on 
the altar of the past, which has made thee so noble ; and 
how canst thou better present them to thy parents than 
by the hands of thy children ? 

What, then, are children really ? Their constant pres- 
ence, and their often disturbing wants, conceal from us 
the charms of these angelic forms, which we know not 
how to name with sufficient beauty and tenderness, — 
blossoms, dew-drops, stars, butterflies. But when you 
kiss and love them, you give and feel all their names ! 
A single child upon the earth would seem to us a won- 



CONCLUSION. 399 

derful angel, come from some distant home, who, unac- 
customed to our strange language, manners, and air, 
looked at us speecliless and inquisitive, but pure as a 
Raffaelle's infant Jesus ; and hence, we can always adopt 
every new child into the child's place, but not every new 
friend into the friend's place. And daily from the un- 
known world these pure beings are sent upon the wild 
earth ; and sometimes they alight on slave-coasts, or bat- 
tle-fields, or in prison for execution ; and sometimes in 
flowery valleys, and on lofty mountains ; sometimes in a 
most baleful, sometimes in a most holy age ; and after the 
loss of their only father they seek an adopted one here 
below. 

I once composed a poem on the Last Day, and the two 
last children : — its latter part will serve for a conclusion. 

" So go down to the earth," said the angel to two little 
naked souls, " and be born as brother and sister ! " It 
will be very pretty down there, said they both, and flew 
hand in hand to the earth, which was already enveloped 
in the flames of the last day, and from which the dead 
were rising. " Look there ! " said the brother, " these 
are very big, tall children ; the flowers, compared to 
them, are quite little ; they will certainly carry us about 
everywhere, and tell us about everything ; they are very 
large angels, sister ! " " But see," answered she, " that 
great angel, and every one has clothing round him; — 
and the mornin": red dows over the whole earth." " But 
look," said he, " the sun has fallen upon the earth, and it 
burns everywhere ; and there a gigantic dew-drop makes 
fiery waves, and look how the great angels plunge into 
it." " They stretch their hands upwards," said she, " and 
kiss them to us." " And hark!" he said, " how the thun- 
der sings, and the stars dance about among those great 



400 



LEVANA. 



children." " Which are the great children," asked she, 
*' who are to be our two parents ? " " Dost thou not see," 
replied he, " how these angels sleep under the earth, and 
then rise up from it ? Let us fly quickly I " And the 
children approached nearer to the flaming earth, and said, 
"Look kindly upon us, ye parents, and do not hurt us, and 
play with us a long, long time, and tell us many tales, and 
kiss us ! " 

They were born just as the world, full of sins, vanished 
and they remained alone ; their little hands played with 
the flames, and at last they also, like Adam and Eve, 
were driven away, and the world closed with the Para- 
dise of Children. 



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